


no wider than the heart is wide

by runobody2



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Buffy The Vampire Slayer Fusion, Canon-Typical suicidal ideation, F/F, Friends to Enemies to Lovers, POV Multiple, Slow Burn, Temporary Character Death, canon-typical child abuse, implicit condemnation of joss whedon's writing choices, more ships and characters shall be tagged as they appear, mostly adora and catra though, no-one dies for real unless they also do in canon, stealing plot points from faith spike AND angel to give to catra, wait other than hordak sorry...., we are doing the WHOLE hog that is:
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:20:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25155355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/runobody2/pseuds/runobody2
Summary: Time does not slow as her hands close around Catra’s wrists, still inches from her chest. There is only the honeyed ease of it, like plucking a fruit from the vine, or a note from a string. Slayer reflexes, she realizes.What dissipates then instead of heat is an entire childhood of evenly matched competition; is last week when they wrestled here on this very grass and had gotten tired and laughingly called a truce before either of them could stay on top for more than a minute.A Buffy the Vampire Slayer AU. No knowledge of Buffy necessary to read!  Expect: high-school and then college-age modern au, Adora acquiring superpowers and fighting the supernatural forces of darkness (but was that really such a good idea?), and high drama right beside the mundane.
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra), Catra & Scorpia (She-Ra)
Comments: 32
Kudos: 51





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> if i've done my job at all right you shouldn't need any knowledge of buffy to read this! however in case anything is confusing, you may want to see the end note where i have explained various terms.

The night the weight of the world settles in to weave its fingers around her neck, Adora goes to bed with glitter in her hair. She had woken up the morning prior possessed of some dark sea-slippery mass that roiled in her stomach and made her movements angular and abrupt. Catra had teased her about it on their way to school, bumping her shoulder as they walked and knocking her perilously close to the edge of the sidewalk. “Adora,” she’d said, dragging out the vowels. “Why so tense? We’ve been back in school for a _week_. I know for a fact you don’t have any tests yet. Even if you did, we’re second semester seniors now. We’ve submitted our college applications already, and nothing matters anymore.”

Adora had been ready to protest, but her mouth snapped shut on “college applications”. Catra was smug. “Worried that every school you applied to is going to be able to see what an idiot you are?”

“I’m _not!_ ”, said Adora. “And you’d better hope they don’t, because if they think that I’m an idiot, then you must be—”

“I must be the one who knows just how to get you to loosen up.”

Warning lit up Adora’s mind in its long-practiced patterns. “This isn’t going to be like the time you insisted that Mrs. Merengly wasn’t going to notice if we stole one of her hens, is it?”

“That was funny and you know it. Anyways, you should trust me more,” Catra said, and dug around in the back pocket of her jeans. With a flourish, she procured two only slightly crumpled slips of paper.

“Winter formal tickets?” said Adora, a little surprised.

“Don’t give me that tone. I saw you looking at the flyers just yesterday when you thought I couldn’t see,” Catra said. Adora _had_ been looking, and she _had_ thought Catra couldn’t see.

“Wait,” said Adora. “The flyer that said that they’d stopped selling early-bird tickets on Wednesday?”

Catra only grinned. “Nicked them off Kyle.”

“Catra!”

“What?” Catra said. “I’m saving him the trouble of getting rejected by whoever he was going to ask.” Probably this was true.

“But—Shadoweaver? You think she’d want us to go?” said Adora, although she could already feel something loosening under her skin.

Catra made a garbled sound that might have been a groan. “Who cares about Shadoweaver? Anyways, on Friday nights she’s always out of the house late at her Watcher’s Council meeting. We can just get chores and training done early and be there and back before she even knows we’re gone. Come on, Adora, I know you’ve wanted to go to a school dance since we were freshmen.”

“That’s right,” said Adora suddenly. “Because when we were freshmen, I kept telling you about how much I wanted to go to one, and you kept telling me that they were stupid and you never would, huh?” She finally bumped Catra back on the shoulder.

“People change!” Catra said, a little too loudly for the early state of the morning. “So you’ll go? We’re not going to grow too weak to face the forces of darkness after just one dance,” she said, dry.

“Or at least I’m not,” said Adora. “I guess beating you at sparring can wait until tomorrow. I’ll go. I mean, it would be pretty rude of me not to, since you’re doing it just for me and everything.”

“Shut up!” said Catra. They were reaching the last bend in the road before campus came into view, with the waist high-brick wall Catra always liked to hop on to walk across the top. She leapt up and spread her arms out, which Adora privately suspected she did less because she really needed to for balance and more for the joy of the movement. “Don’t make a big deal out of it. This is not because I like you.”

But when Adora looks up at her, she’s smiling her wide, victorious smile. The day is cold, and bright, and windy. Adora feels so light she could blow away.

Catra’s still smiling that night when they pull up to the dance, Adora in her nicest blouse and Catra in her normal ripped black jeans. Shadoweaver isn’t big on buying them party clothes. It doesn’t matter: when Catra pulls her, laughing, past the photo-booth where Adora’s unfortunate glitter mishap with the badly taped tinsel snowflake is ultimately going to occur, she thinks that Catra looks like a million bucks. Later, when Adora finishes brushing her teeth and tiptoes by habit back to their room, Catra is curled up already on Adora’s bed, the dim hallway light illuminating the little grin she’s making in sleep.

That night, the Slayer power, gone from the world two decades, comes back. It slips down with the moonlight, through their winding street with the weedy lots of grass, and then past the crack between the floor and the door, to sink under Adora’s skin, sharp and strong as a blade.

Adora wakes in the early morning to the doorbell ringing at polite intervals of a minute between. She opens her eyes tense, aware as she does of some electric difference in the tilt of her body towards the earth. She had been dreaming, she knows, some kind of dream that had blood in it, and in the moment of waking she has an abiding conviction that that was why the marrow in her bones feels so strangely, and so charged.

Then familiarity sets in again. She’s in bed, the doorbell’s ringing, and Catra’s hidden her head under her pillow in discontent; Adora reaches out to shake her awake. Catra flinches and sits up immediately, brow wrinkling. “Adora,” she says, “That hurt.” She puts her hand on her shoulder, where Adora had touched her, just as the doorbell rings again. “Fuck, what time is it?”

Adora reaches for her phone. “6:17.”

“Whyyyy,” says Catra. “Oh no, do you think this is going to be another one of Shadoweaver’s weird tests?”

Adora shudders. “As long as it isn’t like—”

“When she woke us up in the middle of the night to drive us out to the woods and have you track me? Yeah, that was an all-time low.”

“I was picking splinters out for a week.” Adora’s getting out of bed now, pulling on jeans.

“Like you have anything to complain about. You weren’t the one pretending to be a vampire being chased through the woods. She didn’t enchant that stake to tase _you_ when it touched your heart.”

Adora’s hands still as she puts on her shirt. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t know it would do that.” She remembers the adrenaline of spotting a flash of Catra’s dark hair in the speckled moonlight. Between then and when she had pressed the blunt tip of the stake against Catra’s chest and Catra had stiffened and begun to shake is an empty space.

Catra’s at the door already, rolling her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, I know. That was Shadoweaver, not you. Anyways, you know I let you catch me in the end just so we could go home and go the fuck to sleep.”

There’s a stranger in the kitchen. Shadoweaver, facing her, leaks her patented brand of simpering desperation like water off ice. Her voice cuts off suddenly when the girls come in.

“Hello,” says the stranger, a tall, severely dressed woman with close-cropped hair. “I’m Ms. Lighthope.” She gives a miniscule pause before continuing on as flatly as she began. There’s a hint of an English accent in her voice. “But you may simply call me Lighthope, if that makes you more comfortable. I’m from the Watcher’s Council.” She’s holding a smooth white stone in her hands. She glances over both girls before turning to Adora. “Do you mind taking this stone?”

“Uh, no—Ms., I mean, Lighthope,” Adora says automatically, and takes it. As soon as it touches her skin, it begins to pulse blue. Adora scratches the back of her neck. “Is it, um, supposed to be doing this?”

Lighthope’s gaze lights upon Adora in the way a match lit in a darkened room does, dimming all else. “I very much hope so,” she says, taking the stone from her again and pocketing it. She turns back to Adora, gravely. Her eyes are still fixed upon Adora when she says the words, with the lilting rhythm of recitation. “Into every generation a slayer is born—” Lighthope pauses here, considering. “Well, every generation but the last, I suppose. Where were we? One girl in all the world, a chosen one. She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires, demons, and forces of darkness; to stop the spread of evil and the swell of their number. She is the Slayer.”

“Yeah, we know,” says Catra, bored but wary. “It’s what Shadoweaver’s been training us for, as Potential Slayers. Even though the magic’s been all haywire and there hasn’t been one chosen since the last slayer twenty years ago.”

“Mara,” Lighthope says, her voice running over the name as one might run their fingers over a pressed flower in a dusty old book. “Very true. Well, until last night. You were asking about the stone. What the stone does is change colors in the presence of a Slayer.” She hasn’t looked away from Adora. “That’s you,” she says.

Adora is very aware, very suddenly, of the placement of everyone in the kitchen, Lighthope standing unbent in the very center on the dip in the floorboards where the water collects every time someone mops, Shadoweaver with her hands clenched by the cabinets. Catra behind her and to her right, leaning against the doorway like a bracket: holding out and holding in. As if by cataloguing the bodies Adora can place herself again in the world. “You’re saying. . . you’re saying I’m the new slayer?” she says, stupidly.

“Yes,” says Lighthope. “The world has need of the power again, and it returned as we knew it would. I’m assigned to be your Watcher, and I came here today to retrieve you. You’ll be staying with me from now on, as well as transferring schools to Bright Moon High.”

“Which is where we were when you girls came in,” Shadoweaver finally says in her thready voice. She forces a smile at Lighthope. “I’m a perfectly qualified Watcher as well. I don’t see why Adora can’t stay in my care.”

Lighthope turns to Shadoweaver slowly, almost magnanimously. “Your work thusfar in training the current slayer is much appreciated,” she said, as if speaking to a particularly charming bug. But she continues on in her tone that brooks no disagreement. “But the Council has made their decision.”

“What I simply don’t understand is—” Shadoweaver seems suddenly to realize her audience. “Adora. Catra. In the yard, now,” she says.

They go.

She doesn’t realize that it's cold outside until she sees her and Catra’s breaths hanging lace-white in the winter-morning glare over the old dead grass. Moved to where they can’t be seen through the kitchen windows, she begins to feel freed of her sticky bodilessness. Alone with Catra, it can be sufficiently orienting to know that they’re facing each other, not quite three feet apart. “Adora? Adora. You aren’t seriously considering this, are you?” she says.

Catra’s got her feet shoved only halfway into her sneakers, and a loop of hair sticking apart from the rest that Adora wants to tuck away behind the shell of her ear. “What do you mean?” She can say it without feeling part reverie.

Catra bends her wrist, agitated, rotating it back and forth like a wrench on a leaking pipe. “The slayer stuff.”

“What is there to consider?” All her thoughts are returning to her head, heartbeat fast, clear and distant and multitudinous as a school of darting fish.

Catra’s brought her other hand around to clasp her wrist, holding it still. “So you’d do it? You’d go live with some Watcher we’ve never met, and transfer to Bright Moon High, and you’d leave me?” There’s some bright peal to her voice, higher than censure and blunter than challenge. Adora can feel the familiar turf of argument slipping away beneath her feet, sand into the sea.

Unbidden, she considers Adora-without-Catra, but the shadowy figure of her remains incoherent; inaccessible as an unmet stranger, treading though she may through some familiar grove. “She might not—Shadoweaver might be able to keep me. And if she can’t, Bright Moon is a half hour bus ride away. You’re still going to hear from me every day. I’ll call you. I’ll do whatever it takes.” She can’t force a smile, but she firms the line of her mouth. “I can’t not be the Slayer, Catra. It’s not a—choice thing.”

“Can’t you see anything that’s right in front of you? Shadoweaver’s not winning this one." Catra says, not quite looking at Adora. She's angry enough to vibrate with it, like the shimmer of air before a growing fire. A familiar heat, which Adora has been warmed and burned by in turns, with something new and mercurial slipping through as she continues. "And it is a choice to buy into it. Why do you trust them anyways? What has the Watcher’s Council ever done for us?”

Adora steps closer to Catra, meaning to touch her shoulder. She sees in her mind's eye, knowing the fantasy already, her hand on the stiff ridge of Catra's clavicle: the tension there dissipating like candy floss on her dampened tongue some sweaty summer day, leaving nothing but the sugar-salt residue. Instead, when she gets too close Catra reaches out to shove her away. Time does not slow as her hands close around Catra’s wrists, still inches from her chest. There is only the honeyed ease of it, like plucking a fruit from the vine, or a note from a string. Slayer reflexes, she realizes. What dissipates then instead of heat is an entire childhood of evenly matched competition; is last week when they wrestled here on this very grass and had gotten tired and laughingly called a truce before either of them could stay on top for more than a minute. Catra's looking directly at her now, eyes wide and mouth closed. Both of them, having been caught by accident, are silent and still. Distantly they hear from the kitchen the even hum of Lighthope's clipped mild tones and Shadoweaver's rising derision.

When Catra speaks again it is softer than it was, echoing from some lonely place where a plea had wandered in and gotten lost one violet evening long ago. “Of course it's a choice. You can do whatever you want, Adora. You could run away with me.”

"It's not, Catra." There's something a little sharp in Adora now, suddenly. It had been quiet in the kitchen, that moment after Lighthope had given her her destiny. She doesn't know how to explain to Catra that what she had felt then had been vertigo, yes, but in the changeable instant before that, the clarion release of certainty. She closes her eyes. She tries. “When she said I was the slayer it was—it was, I don’t know. A relief,” she says, thinking of the absolute gratitude of it, but she knows already, feeling Catra tense under her palms, that she’s made a mistake. She changes tacts, opening her eyes. The anger that had absented itself, by will or by force, from Catra’s expression just a moment ago has returned in its entirety. "You heard Lighthope back there. I was called because the world needs a slayer again. I can't just turn my back on people who need me."

Catra wrenches her hands free and Adora lets her. They curl to fists at her sides as she hacks up curling laughs from somewhere deep in her chest. Adora watches in horror. "So you really believed all that crap about how you were the hero, huh?" She's smiling now, bitter-edged. "I guess it makes sense. You were always—the golden girl who'd thank someone for lying to her. I don't care. You can go play toy soldier if that’s you want. If that's really how it's going to be, you don't need to bother to write."

"Catra—"

"Adora." Shadoweaver, from the kitchen door.

"Go on," Catra says, "Isn't that your cue?"

She goes.

“Ms. Lighthope here is going to be your new Watcher,” says Shadoweaver. She’s smiling with none of her teeth; Adora watches carefully the fattening of her glamor-smooth cheek by degrees. The woman in question is sitting calmly at the kitchen table, having acquired a cup of coffee since Adora had seen her last. “Go pack your things, Adora. I told her it wouldn’t take more than an hour.”

“Feel free to take your time,” Lighthope says placidly. “Better than missing something and having to come back.” 

She doesn’t own a suitcase of any kind, so she makes do with big black trashbags. It’s fine, there’s not so much to take. They had done laundry yesterday, so it’s easier than it normally would be to separate the stack of shirts that is hers from the stack that is Catra’s. When she finishes with her clothes there’s the crate under her bed filled with old books and accumulated detritus, her backpack and all its contents, her hairbrush which she nearly forgets.

She leaves the big shared bottle of sunscreen that she’s always trying to convince Catra to use on their desk as a reminder, and stares without meaning to at the spot on her bed where Catra might be sitting, if she had come in with her. Shadoweaver had only asked for Adora, but usually that didn’t stop her from at least trying. Adora goes to the window and loosens the blinds just a little, peering through the slats to see Catra still in the yard under the trees, back squared to the house. It’s been close to an hour already; she must be getting cold. Adora can’t see her hands—crossed perhaps, or shoved into her pockets.

Maybe it’s better that Catra hadn’t come up; easier to dismantle her life without half of it looking on. She puts her backpack on, and places her bag of clothes on top of her box of stuff. They’re lighter than they should be in her arms.

Shadoweaver is waiting for her in the hall. “Adora,” she says. “It seems that you are to leave my care.” She comes closer to cup her cheek like an egg in the palm of her hand. She smells, as always, like the anise and wormwood she uses in her spells. The familiar scent makes Adora tremble slightly. She feels for a moment exactly like she did when she was very young, when she had lived in this house alone with Shadoweaver, before Catra had arrived. “Do as I have taught you. Be good. Do not forget where you came from.”

“Yes, Shadoweaver,” Adora says. “I will. And I won’t forget.”

Shadoweaver nods once, unreadable, and drops her hand.

Adora walks out the door then and puts all her things in the back of Lighthope’s little blue sedan and climbs gingerly into the shotgun seat. When she glances back, it’s still only Shadoweaver there, cutting a dark figure on the porch under the faded blue paint of the house Adora’s spent her entire life living in. She looks away when the car starts to move, before the image can grow small.

Lighthope’s house is a quiet fifteen-minute drive away, but in most other respects it is very far from Adora’s childhood home. Every room is spotlessly tasteful if austere, like a model home for a housekeeping magazine the day before the decorator is meant to come in and add the final softening touches.

There are two spare rooms. Lighthope lets her pick between them; Adora chooses the smaller one, which approximates the size of the room she had shared with Catra up until that morning. Lighthope tells her to take a minute to settle in, and to find her downstairs in the basement when she’s ready.

She puts her things down, opening the closet door experimentally. A tree outside her window casts dappled patterns on the muted green-gray color of the walls. The bed is larger than the one she has at—she cuts herself off before she can think _home_. When she runs her hands over the blankets, they’re smooth and soft and soothing.

Lighthope had said “basement” but clearly actually meant “training facility.” Racks of knives and swords and stakes line the walls. There’s a punching bag and weights in one corner, and a pommel horse in another. Before she can take in very much more however, Lighthope gestures for her to sit in one of the chairs at the side of the room.

“I was thinking that we would run some diagnostic tests on your reflexes and strength,” Lighthope says. She’s rummaging around in a bin for something. “And at the same time we can talk. I’m sure you have questions for me. I have questions for you. Aha!” says Lighthope, seeming to find whatever it is she was looking for. She tosses something to Adora which she catches on impulse, which is how Adora comes face to face with her second magical stone of the day. Lighthope explains that it’s to measure her reflexes, and tells her what actions to take when it changes color or temperature. Frankly, it seems not dissimilar to Adora to a more convoluted version of the popular children’s toy known as the Bop It.

Lighthope starts to speak as soon as Adora’s gotten the hang of the controls. “I told you that you’d be transferring to Bright Moon High,” she said. “But I’m afraid I didn’t explain that I’m actually the school librarian there.”

“That’s really cool. I’ve always loved books.” says Adora, before becoming distracted by the orange flashing of the object in her hands. “But aren’t you a Watcher?”

“I was assigned to the Bright Moon High because there are several Potential Slayers attending school there. And it’ll be convenient to be able to easily contact you during the school day in the case of any emergency. Furthermore, the Hellmouth is focalized under the school library.”

“The Hellmouth?” Adora really wishes that Lighthope hadn’t given her such a distracting task. The magic stone starts to burn her fingers before she quickly taps her chin against it.

“Oh, yes. I suppose you might not know. The city of Bright Moon happens to be built upon a Hellmouth, a place where the barriers between dimensions are particularly weak. That’s why there’s an abnormal amount of demonic activity here. For the past several decades it’s been relatively quiet, but recently there have been rumors of stirrings. . . and of course now you’re here.”

Adora’s changed her mind. She’s grateful that the stone has started to emit a faint smell of grapes and she has to breathe on it, freeing her from the responsibility of responding to all that.

Lighthope continues on blithely. “Now I’m sure you’re wondering about your schedule here. From when school ends at three until dinner at six will be sufficient time to get your homework done and everything of that nature, I hope?”

“Yes,” says Adora haltingly. She’s surprised; Shadoweaver had never blocked out free time like that. You never knew when she would appear and commandeer four hours of your time for strength training, and simply had to plan schoolwork and other activities around the expectation of being suddenly interrupted. There were certain times she would be out of the house, but even then she often left lists of tasks to complete.

“After dinner we’ll go over training until a little after sunfall, and then you’ll have patrol from then until eleven. Later, maybe, depending on recent activity or any particular supernatural plots. Then a brief debrief and bed. Weekends you have free until lunchtime, and then training, once again until sunfall when patrol starts. We can start there and adjust at will; flexibility is important for a Slayer, after all.” Somehow Adora had _heard_ the semi-colon. Lighthope pauses expectantly. “Any questions?”

Adora does in fact have many questions, but she doesn’t know where to begin, so instead she says “Maybe not, um, right now. Can I ask them as they come?”

“Of course,” says Lighthope. “Why don’t I start asking you some questions to establish general knowledge? All things Shadoweaver should have taught you a long time ago, but it never hurts to be cautious. What are a vampire’s weaknesses?”

Adora relaxes. This really is an easy one. “Sunlight,” she says. “Can’t come in unless invited, of course. They look human usually, but they have to bare their vampiric face before biting. Fire, decapitation, holy water and symbols of any denomination. A stake—well, anything wooden really, through the heart. . .”

She calls Catra that night. It goes straight to voicemail, which doesn’t surprise her; quite probably she’s with Shadoweaver. “I’m, um, sorry for how we left off. I meant it when I said you weren’t getting rid of me so easily. Please call me back and we can work it out, okay? I’ll even turn my phone off silent,” she says, putting a little bit of a smile into the words. _I know you didn’t mean it_ , she wants to say. But something other than sensing it wouldn’t go over well catches the sentiment before it can leave her throat. After all, she herself had meant every word.

She has to get to school early on Monday to pick up her schedule from the registrar, but she otherwise faces shockingly little administrative hassle. She supposes it helps that her new guardian is the school librarian; similarly, she’s sure the Watcher’s Council must have greased some wheels to get her wardship paperwork approved so quickly. Bureaucracy: as ever, impenetrable until nepotism.

If there was any time that she had to transfer, second semester senior year is probably as good as any. Bright Moon begins a week after Horde High, so she even gets to start at the very beginning of the semester. Adora’s gotten all the classes she wanted, i.e. the ones that matched up best with the classes she’d been previously taking, much to her relief. In general it seemed that all the classes she was taking at Horde were also offered at Bright Moon, and then some. She pulls out the school map she’d printed last night from the website and notated with every possible classroom that she might have, and locates her first class, which is Physics. She sighs. She’s always nervous on the first day of school, meeting all her new teachers, and she’d thought that she’d already had that particular high school experience for the last time. She’d also thought that she had been looking down the barrel of the last few months she had of her life as it always had been, expecting to slip easily, even sweetly, through the remaining dregs of her childhood. Instead, she had woken up Saturday morning with everything having changed in the night.

She walks into the Physics classroom unreasonably terrified that the teacher won’t know why she’s there and will tell her there’s been some mistake and there isn’t room for her after all. Instead, the woman smiles at her and pulls out an extra syllabus and a classroom copy of the textbook. By stroke of luck, it’s the same textbook she was using at her old school, although they’re two chapters ahead that she’ll have to catch up.

This whole year, Catra had been the one explaining tricky physics concepts to Adora before tests, theatrically exasperated as she looked over her homework, playing at impatience it didn’t seem she actually felt. Catra, who hasn’t returned any of Adora’s three missed calls and has left five of her texts on read. Somehow, Adora doesn’t think that making her next plea about an upcoming physics lab is going to be the thing that breaks the silence.

Other than a few curious glances when she introduces herself, her new classmates seem to all ignore her, though in a way Adora senses is more polite than belligerent. All her classes go much the same. In AP U.S. History, she faces the exact opposite problem as she had encountered in Physics, finding that she’s been catapulted back in time to learning about the Great Depression. There’s an art elective requirement here that there hadn’t been at Horde, and she’d decided to pick up Drama, where she quickly finds herself feeling out of place. Oh well. She can’t guarantee that her monologue is going to have “emotional verisimilitude”, but it’ll be _really_ thoroughly memorized.

At lunch she heads to the library to pick up her new textbooks. “Hello, Adora,” says Lighthope. It’s nice to be talking to someone who already knows her name. “First day going smoothly?”

“Oh, yeah,” says Adora, with slightly too much emphasis, and hands over her schedule. “It’s going great. Can you get me my textbooks, please?”

“It is my job. Or so I’ve heard,” says Lighthope, and disappears into a backroom a moment later. Adora takes a mint from the bowl on top of the counter as she waits. Behind her, she hears the door swing open as several new people walk in.

“—can’t believe you forgot to return your book before break,” she hears someone say behind her.

“Shut up. Anyways, you’ll never guess what my mom told me happened this weekend,” another person says.

“But I won’t have to, right?” the first person says warmly.

Some jostling, and laughter; the door jingling again as the group finds their way out. The last words she catches before the door closes are, “she said that a new Slayer has been called! And she’s in Bright Moon!” Adora suddenly begins to sweat. It’s not like being a Slayer is a tightly-kept secret—or at least to those in-the-know about the supernatural—but it doesn’t seem right for some random students from her school to know about her being called when she herself barely knows about it.

Lighthope appears again, with a thick stack of books. “Here you are,” she says. “And I’ve included some extracurricular reading from my private collection as well.”

“Thanks,” says Adora, and turns to beat a hasty retreat. Instead, she runs directly into the group she had just been eavesdropping on—two people she’s pretty sure she recognizes from her Drama class—sending all of her books tumbling to the ground.

“Sorry!” she and the boy she’d collided with say simultaneously.

“Oh, hey,” he says, cheerfully. “Aren’t you the new girl? Mirabella?”

“It’s Adora,” says Adora.

“And I’m usually so good with names,” says the boy, with what seems like earnest regret. “I’m Bow,” and gesturing to his friend, “and she’s Glimmer.” He scrambles to help her pick up her books. “Pearson Physics,” he says, reading the title off as he hands it to her. He reaches for the big leather-bound book Lighthope had placed on top of the stack. “And, uh, Rhythelyyke’s Fantasticke Codex of Demons?”

“Wait a minute,” says Glimmer. “Transfer student, Demonology, it’s you, isn’t it? You’re the new Slayer?”

“Um, no,” says Adora. “That’s ridiculous. Absolutely not. I actually don’t know what a Slayer is, even. Also, I have to go. Right now. I’m late for class.” She turns and runs.

“It’s lunch!” Glimmer hollers after her. It might not be her most graceful exit, after all.

The gibbous moon hangs plump and growing in the sky, the first night Adora sets out to parley with the forces of darkness. Adora leans against the chilled white marble of a mausoleum and waits restlessly. She can’t help fidgeting with the stake in her hands. There’s a rustle from the undergrowth and she turns, poised to attack, but there’s nothing there but a squirrel chittering away with a nut. Lighthope, several feet away, stands as isolate and stiff-backed amongst the rows of gravestones as she had, so few days ago, in the middle of Shadoweaver’s kitchen.

She hears the dim banging of it first: two furious fists against the inside of a coffin. The indistinct break of the splintering wood, and then the hard scrabble through six feet of dirt before emergence. Adora remembers reading once that new vampires wake furious and with a burst of strength, as a survival mechanism.

“So?” Catra had said. “Don’t you sometimes wake up furious?”

Surely not as furious as this. Still covered in dirt and clothed in the nice tuxedo he must have been buried in, the vampire lunges at her with his fangs out already, the hard ridge of his brow wrinkled and protruding in his demonic form. “Hey,” he growls, sounding somewhat offended when she dodges easily and aims a kick at his torso.

“Good form,” Lighthope says approvingly from three graves over. Adora wishes she hadn’t; it distracts her from the wild headbutt the vampire makes that lands somewhere around her shoulder.

She hisses and backs away a moment, before intercepting his next punch and wrenching his arm to the side, resulting in a satisfying crack. The vampire groans. “Guess that would have been too convenient, huh?” he rasps.

“You should have read his movement in the way his neck tensed. . .” Lighthope continues on in the background. Adora tunes her out.

For wild minutes she and the vampire trade blows, his frenzied movements against her compact ones. Her earlier restlessness has petered out against the bulwark of a whole lifetime of training. He’s distracted for a moment, and she knows without quite understanding the mechanism of it the place where she can put her hands and throw him against the tombstone behind him. She’s never done any such thing before. It wouldn’t have been practical; she didn’t have the strength.

But now, she heaves, and he crashes against the stone skull first. He’s just looking up, dazed, when she crouches above him and puts the stake through his heart. His eyes haven’t yet had the time to widen, when he bursts haplessly into a cloud of golden dust. Adora pants.

There is a thrill in it. He’s not going to leave the graveyard, not going to happen upon a hapless woman stumbling home alone late tonight from a party. Adora had done that, with her foreign strength. That woman is going to wake up tomorrow morning, hungover but unharmed. Adora feels, suddenly, good.

“Next one?” she says to Lighthope brightly. 

That night when she goes to sleep, there’s the cool shape of a bruise pressed dark against her collarbone. She forgets it sometime in the small hours, mid-turn in the dell of a dream, and in the morning when she wakes it’s disappeared already.

In Drama the next day, the teacher tells everyone that as a warmup they’re going to pair up and tell each other stories with both true and made-up elements. “Oh,” he says. His brow wrinkles as he looks at Adora, a new problem occurring before his very eyes. “But with our new student I’m afraid we no longer have even numbers.”

Bow raises his hand with a winning smile. “Don’t worry, Mr. Haven. Glimmer and I can take her.”

“Excellent,” Mr. Haven says. His moustache looks like it should scratch his nose when he speaks. “Please look after Adora well.” Adora grits her teeth, already feeling badly looked-after.

The room fills immediately with the ambient hum of everyone beginning to tell their stories. There are probably situations that would make it more difficult for Adora to avoid Bow and Glimmer than this one, but she’s having a hard time thinking of them right now. Instead, she’s contemplating how disapproving Mr. Haven would be if on her second day of school she asked to go to the bathroom five minutes into a class taking place immediately after recess.

“Listen,” says Glimmer.

“Yes?” says Adora, clearly eyeing the exits.

“I’m really sorry about yesterday! I know I maybe came on a little strong. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. I guess I just got excited because I mean. . . my mom’s a witch, so I’ve known about the Slayer since I was a little kid. The one girl with the strength and skill to go toe to toe with demons and vampires? I always thought it was the coolest thing. _And,_ I want to help. I’m a witch too.”

“Well, mostly she just levitates pencils and brews me potions she insists are going to make my skin glow.”

“Bow.”

“I said mostly! And I think the potions are working. I do have good skin.”

“Anyways, I made you a charm. It’s a fire spell. If you have it and you say the incantation, it’ll set whatever’s nearest to you just a little bit on fire. I thought it would be useful, since, you know. Vampires!” Before Adora can protest, Glimmer thrusts what looks like a scrap of fabric with some sigils on it into her hands.

“Okay, the incantation is _flameo_. Can you remember that? You have to make sure not to say it until you want to use the charm.”

“Yeah, you don’t want to set something on fire accidentally,” says Bow.

“No, I wouldn’t want that,” says Adora, dubious, and shoves the thing into her pocket as Mr. Haven calls for the class to come back from their groups.

She doesn’t think of it at all that afternoon. Later that evening, it’s the second vampire that does it. Lighthope will chide her later for not paying enough attention to her surroundings; blindfold her and make her catch frisbees in the dark. But in the moment, what she knows is that she’s on the precipice of beating the opponent in front of her when suddenly there’s a blur at the corner of her vision and she’s been caught in a chokehold.

She thrashes for a moment, jamming an elbow into the figure behind her and loosening the grip on her neck sufficiently for her to gasp in a breath, but not to ultimately free her. She doesn’t know exactly what makes her remember—quite suddenly—the lights of the drama classroom, Glimmer pressing the fabric into her hand, telling her the incantation. _Make sure not to say it until you want to use the charm!_

“Flameo,” gasps Adora, feeling foolish. Almost immediately, the vampire behind her drops her arm. She turns; it’s a dark-haired woman, who’d probably died in her mid-thirties. Her shirt is definitely on fire: a very small fire, which she is even now starting to put out, but a fire nonetheless. Adora takes the moment of distraction to stake her, and then the first vampire, luckily still down and out from his previous injuries.

“Huh,” she says.

“What was that?” says Lighthope.

“Oh!” Adora’s tripping over her words suddenly. “So there’s these kids at school who. . . know I’m the Slayer?”

“Who?” Lighthope asks, a little bit shortly.

“Bow and Glimmer?”

Lighthope seems to relax. “Unsurprising. Glimmer’s mother is a powerful witch. She’s the leader of the major coven in Bright Moon. Bow’s parents run the rare and historical bookstore in town. They have an impressive stock of mystical sources. I’ve bought some Akkadian texts from them.”

“And today in class Glimmer made me take this fire charm that I then totally forgot about and swear I wasn’t even going to use—but then when the vampire grabbed me I suddenly remembered it—”

Lighthope hums. “It’s good,” she says finally, “As a Slayer, to have—contacts—among other supernaturally inclined folks. It was clever of you to remember the charm, but in the future you must strive to never be put into such a position to begin with. As a Slayer, you must remember that ultimately others are dependent upon you, not the other way around. Understood?”

“Understood,” says Adora, feeling as if she’d just dodged something.

She hears Bow and Glimmer long before she actually gets to the table they’re eating lunch at. Her hearing has changed since she became the Slayer. It is not that things are louder, exactly, but sharper. A fly she can hear buzzing from across the room, and know with strange certainty just whose desk it’s hiding behind. The stutter in the breath of a stranger as she passes them by. Details about her classmates’ love lives from halfway across the cafeteria.

“Do you know if Mermista and Sea Hawk are dating again?” That’s Bow.

“I didn’t know they’d broken up.”

“I’ve been paired with him for our English project, which is awesome, because you know he and I are bros, but I just want to know what I’m getting into. . .”

“Hi,” says Adora.

Bow and Glimmer pause and turn to look at her in unison. She suddenly feels strangely self-conscious, standing there and holding her lunch tray laden with rice and gray glop, even though similarly unappetizing selections of food are sitting in front of Bow and Glimmer as well.

“So, uh,” says Adora. “I just wanted to thank you. For the fire charm from yesterday. It actually did come in handy.”

Glimmer gasps. “It worked? I mean, of course it worked. Have I ever done a spell that didn’t work?” She pauses. “That’s a rhetorical question.”

The shape of an unfamiliar fondness begins to form in Adora’s chest. “Yeah. It worked.”

Bow cuts in. “You probably don’t know too many people yet, right? Since you just started school two days ago. Why don’t you have lunch with us?”

“Oh! Oh, sure.” She scrambles to put her tray down and find a non-suspicious spot to rest her backpack.

There’s an awkward moment of silence when she finally manages to sit. Then Bow mercifully pipes up again. “So. . . ?”

“So?” says Adora.

“So, you can’t just say that the charm came in handy and then leave us in the dark, Adora. You’ve got to give us the whole story!”

Adora takes a deep breath. “Well, there was this vampire. . .”

Friday finds her sitting in the library with Bow and Glimmer at lunch as Glimmer desperately works through homework due the next period. Adora’s browsing through Rhythelyyke’s Fantasticke Codex of Demons when Glimmer finishes, signing her name with a flourish. “What day is it again Bow?” Glimmer asks, pencil hovering over the header section of her paper.

“January eighteenth,” Bow responds, without looking up from his laptop.

“January the eighteenth?” says Adora.

“Yeah, that’s what I said.”

“Hey, that’s my birthday,” says Adora. And then, after a moment: “I mean, today’s my birthday.”

“Happy birthday!” says Glimmer.

“Happier birthday!” says Bow. “Are you doing anything?”

“I didn’t know it was my birthday until thirty seconds ago, so no.” says Adora. Then she rests her head in her hands. “Oh, god, I’m an adult now. Actually, I’ve been an adult all morning. I was an adult this morning when I messed up the milk to crunch ratio on my cereal.”

It’s because she’s looking down at the table that she misses the glance that Bow and Glimmer exchange over her head. “Well, we know what this means!” says Bow. “ _Impromptu birthday party!”_

 _“At my house!”_ Glimmer continues breathlessly.

“I’m busy tonight,” Adora says. “You know, Slayer stuff.” But by this time she’s realized she’s talking to the empty air; Bow and Glimmer are at the front desk of the library, turning up the wattages on their smiles at Lighthope.

“Oh, no,” says Adora, her chair scraping against the carpet as she rushes to intercept them. They’re already talking though, and she’s left standing frantically aggrieved behind them as they make their pitch.

“. . . And that’s why Adora needs to come over for dinner,” Glimmer finishes. There’s a moment of silence as everyone seems to catch their breaths. Adora opens her mouth to protest that she doesn’t need to do anything for her birthday after all. But then:

“Okay,” says Lighthope slowly. And then, turning sternly to Adora, “But I’m picking you up for patrol right at eight.”

Bow drives them all to Glimmer’s house. It turns out that Glimmer has a car, but he’s been picking her up and driving her back from home every day anyways because he “doesn’t approve of the way she treats turn signals.”

Bow is by all accounts an excellent driver, and he sees them safely into Glimmer’s driveway. “First things first,” says Glimmer authoritatively. “We’re going to bake cupcakes! And then we’ll order takeout, and then—games.”

The cupcakes come out misshapen and slovenly, with great globs of purple frosting sliding off the sides. By the time they finish, everyone has a streak of flour somewhere on their clothes or hair, but they are undeniably delicious, and there’s no harm in licking some wayward frosting off a finger or two. Afterwards, they order-in tacos.

“Shouldn’t we have had dinner first?” asks Adora, idly.

“Nuh-uh,” says Glimmer. “Dessert first. Birthday rules.”

“Never heard that one,” Adora says.

Glimmer laughs. “But you didn’t even remember your birthday, so I’m the expert.”

They sprawl across the floor of Glimmer’s room, eating their tacos off the styrofoam containers and playing Uno with their greasy hands. They’re all startled when the 7:45 alarm goes off on Adora’s phone to indicate that Lighthope is arriving soon.

“And before anyone can win,” says Adora.

“It’s probably for the best,” Bow replies.

“You’re just saying that because you’re losing!”

“The joy of Uno is that it is a game where one can return from extraordinary setbacks,” Bow says. And then, suddenly remembering, “Don’t forget to take the extra cupcake!”

Adora picks it up, dislodging a clump of frosting as she does, which she immediately licks away. It’s sweet in her mouth as she thanks them.

“It’s our pleasure,” says Glimmer.

“Group hug!” calls Bow, and Adora barely manages herself to disentangle herself in time to make it out front the house as Lighthope pulls up.

She beats eight vampires that night, easy as anything, a new record for her. She can still taste the rasberry-sweetness of frosting in her mouth the whole time. For a birthday she hadn’t even known was happening, she feels satisfied with the way the day turned out.

But slipping back into her room after her shower, as a breeze slips through the open crack of the window and cools the damp nape of her neck, Adora recalls another birthday. She’d turned twelve on a Saturday, and after lunch, Shadoweaver with unusual amiability had told them as she left the house that they had the afternoon to do with as they pleased. Her mind had just begun to whirr with the unfamiliar freedom when Catra smiled secretively at her and told her she already had a plan.

Catra had taken her first on one bus and then on another and they’d ridden for what had felt like an interminable period of time. She’d been starting to worry that Catra had gotten them lost, even though Catra had always been the one who was able to get them where they needed to go without double-checking every timetable half a dozen times like Adora did. Adora was growing irritable when they finally reached the squat gray building in an unfamiliar part of town that appeared to be their destination. “Where are we?” she’d asked, plaintively.

For a long time afterwards, she hadn’t thought she’d ever again feel such an exotic pleasure as when Catra had leaned over and whispered in her ear, “the ice rink, you dummy.” At the counter when they’d gone in, Catra had forked over what had to have been a week of lunch money and requested two pairs of rental skates, rattling off both their sizes before Adora could open her mouth.

They’d started out hand in hand, clinging to the wall, but by the end of the afternoon they were zipping after each other across the center of the rink. Adora liked the smooth gliding motion of it, the windy rush of speed. 

After getting kicked off the ice by the Zamboni for what the clock hung high on the wall dictated ought to be the last time, they sat together on the low perimeter bleachers. They’d put their shoes on already, but neither of them made any move to get up. Adora looked around, dragging out the moments until they’d have to go, eyeing first one or two girls waiting in their brightly colored figure-skating outfits and then a nearby claw machine filled with stuffed animals.

“Which one do you want?” Catra had asked, with sudden intentfulness.

“What?”

Catra elbowed her. “Which stuffed animal?”

“The pegasus,” she’d said, without thought.

Catra had hummed and dug a few spare quarters out of her pocket. Adora walked up to examine the controls, but Catra had snapped, “Hey! They’re my quarters,” and then a bit more mildly, “Go help me look at it from the side.”

Catra slid in the quarters and pressed the button to start, moving the joystick to the side tentatively.

“Forwards a bit?” she’d said.

“Just—there,” Adora had told her, feeling suddenly anxious.

The claw came down, hooking around the leg and torso of a pegasus plush. They watched, riveted, as it ascended—with the plush—and ambled slowly over to the drop area before the claw noticeably loosened, landing their catch halfway over the ledge and halfway not.

“Ugh!” Catra had exclaimed, and banged the flat of her hand against the machine. Adora remembered her slow-motion wonder as the force of it tilted one hoof and then another down into the chute area. She’d whooped, hugged Catra, and then bent to pick up her prize.

“Best birthday ever,” Adora had said. “I’m naming him Swift Wind.”

Swift Wind had sat on her lap all the long way home, and then on her bed for years afterwards. She’d finally taken him off when she’d started high school, figuring she’s grown beyond such childishness. But he’d still had an honored spot in their closet, and on nights when she was up late studying for a test, she’d take him out and put him on her desk to keep her company.

Adora checks her phone on impulse. Catra still hasn’t responded to any of her messages, even though it’s gotten to the point that, sending yet another one this morning, Adora had become suddenly aware that adding to the pile of texts left on read would have seemed on some stranger’s phone distinctly pathetic. The thought rankled. This was Catra. It was foreign to think about her in those terms.

She wonders if Catra had remembered her birthday. Adora herself hadn’t, after all, but somehow it seems more implausible to believe that Catra would have forgotten. She’ll go visit her tomorrow morning, she decides, maybe early when she’s likely to still be in bed. It would have been easier if Catra would text her back, and then Adora would know. If she would tell Adora where to be, she’d be there. Wasn’t there a song that went that way? Adora shakes her head a moment to clear it, and goes after a moment of thought to open the wardrobe, where she’d put Swift Wind, still slightly mishapen from his journey in the plastic crate, probably in need of a good squish to even him out.

He isn’t there. In his stead, a crisp fold of notebook paper. _thought i told you not to write_ , and then on the other side, _regretted giving him to you so i’ve taken him back_. 

Catra hadn’t signed it, and hadn’t needed to.

How had she done it? Adora had texted her her new address, she remembers faintly. She thinks of Catra—taking the bus here, or had she gotten someone to drop her off—bridging that distance between them. Climbing the tree outside, probably, which she’d always been good at—the cracked-open window—sitting on Adora’s bed, maybe. What else in her room had she touched, before or after finding Swift Wind?

Adora leans her head against the wall, slumping. She’s angry, she realizes. It hurts acutely, like a jagged crack in a cup that prevents it from holding water: a wound that makes itself known. All that trouble, and she hadn’t even stayed to say anything to her face. So, as Adora had sensed anyways was true, Catra hadn’t forgotten her birthday after all: had remembered well enough to give her twelve feet up the rough bark of a tree; _thought i told you not to write_ ; the cold that seeps in from under the window to stir the fine hairs brushing her forehead; and an absence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm doing my best to write this story so that you shouldn't need any outside knowledge of buffy. but just in case anything was confusing or whatever, heres also just some worldbuilding stuff directly. does include some extra info that you would not be able to know just from reading this chapter:
> 
> the Slayer is the one girl in the all the world with superhuman strength, healing, reflexes etc., tasked with defeating the forces of evil. usually a new teen girl is called when the old slayer dies, but there's been a twenty year gap since the last one (Mara). the watchers/watcher's council are an organization in charge of, idk, training and managing slayers and potentials (girls with the potential to become the slayer lmao).
> 
> demons are real and there are many types of them with various levels of consciousness and morality. vampires are real and are fully evil demons in formerly human bodies. they're made when a vampire sucks your blood then feeds you some of their blood right before they die. most people do not know about the supernatural existing, although obviously there are exceptions such as the watchers or witches (magic, also, is real).  
> *  
> ok hopefully that was not too painful. thank you for staying with me thus far if you're reading this! feel free to come talk to me on [tumblr](http://jade-ellsworth.tumblr.com) about she-ra or buffy or anything at all! or, you know, leave a comment. i am feeling some trepidation because i've never written something this long before, but there are so many sections i'm excited to write in the future, so you know, onwards. i would love for the next chapter to be up in a week but realistically it'll be sometime between one week and two.
> 
> oh also bonus fact: no, adora is not getting all the classes she wants because lighthope is the school librarian it is because the watcher's council is making huge donations to her school. but she doesn't know that.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uh i vaguely implied it last chapter but to be clear: catra is not a catgirl in this fanfic. she is a human person and i’ve also elected to make her chinese for the following reasons: (a) white catra is incoherent IMO (b) i’m chinese and i … didn’t want to do any research … (c) especially b/c by nature of her backstory she was raised by shadoweaver* starting from a young age and thus would be cut off from her cultural background--a sensitive narrative for many racial groups which I decided I didn’t feel comfortable writing casually for a culture not my own (d) also I do think like just as an artistic choice asian mean girl catra is cute and valid.
> 
> * for whatever reason i’ve decided it would be very hysterical for shadoweaver to be italian. i don’t know why, i don’t have anything against italians. (on the other hand i feel strongly about oppressing the british…. anyway)
> 
> oh also, just because i had a friend whose reading comprehension i deeply trust be confused about this (hey sabrina if you're out there). covens/witches are not connected w/ the watcher's council. and you don't have to be in a coven to do magic, either.

There’s nothing really for Catra to be doing lingering at school like this, half an hour after it’s ended. She’s leaning idly against an outside wall near her locker, wondering how much longer she can bide her time, weighing the extra minutes she can spend away from her house and the empty bed in her room and Shadoweaver against the odds that Shadoweaver’s going to be furious she dawdled.

The odds are high as of late. If it had been anything else, how honey-sweet might it have been to see the way Adora being called and promptly whisked away by some other Watcher had destabilized Shadoweaver’s equilibrium. There might have been some satisfaction in catching the turn of her eyes towards Adora’s place at the kitchen table. Instead, the familiarity of the movement, mirrored in a hundred paths Catra herself had trodden down in the week since Adora left, burns all the way down. More so than the particularly vicious skeleton warrior Shadoweaver had summoned for her to defeat after dinner, but that had hurt too. She sighs and unsticks herself from the wall, deciding to stop pushing her luck and head home. She strolls down the corridor, turns the corridor and—stops.

There’s a girl there, kneeling on the pavement over a pigeon with an injured wing. Her hands, lit up with a soft green glow, hover over the broken bone. A swirl of shiny red welts marbles the visible skin of her hands, leading up under her long sleeves. Catra lets her eyes slip past them: she can recognize the look of a scar that’s been set in its ways. She glances down at the pigeon instead, which as she watches begins to knit itself back together again.

The girl notices her suddenly. Catra’s had a few classes with her over the years, hasn’t she? What’s her name—Scorpia? That sounds right. “Oh,” Scorpia says. “Oh no. This is not what it looks like.”

“Are you sure?” says Catra. “It really looks a lot like magic.”

“You uh. . . know about magic?”

Catra stares at her, unimpressed. Scorpia, sitting cross-legged on the ground, looks up at her haplessly.

“Okay, it’s magic,” Scorpia says. She sounds more than just anxious; Catra catalogues without really meaning to the unsteady note in her voice. “But I’m not—I’m not going to hurt you. It’s just. . . I almost didn’t see the bird. I almost stepped on it, and then it was just lying there too hurt to fly and I didn’t know what else to do. Please,” and her voice drops a little bit, “don’t be scared.” 

“I’m not—” scared, she means to scoff. Like you could hurt me. She would have meant it, too, thoughtlessly. But in a moment of unexpected and unsolicited revolt, her body remembers magic then, the unnegotiable grip of it. That night in the woods, after Adora had pressed the stake to her heart, and her muscles had seized up and her mind had emptied of anything but that sharp convulsing sensation; the one horrible afternoon when she was twelve and Shadoweaver had decided she needed a lesson on every type of pain she could hold in the palm of her hand. The cut on her shin from the skeleton warrior last night begins to throb. “I’m not scared,” she tries again, not quite steadily. She doesn’t get it, because she’s really not.

Scorpia shrinks in on herself, her broad shoulders curling up like paint on an old wall. “You’re right to be scared,” she says.

“I’m sorry, did you not hear me the first time?” says Catra, angry now. “I’m _not_ scared. I don’t know what you’ve been told, but magic’s just a tool. There’s no reason to be scared of it.” In a sudden burst of movement, she strides forward and then slides down until she’s sitting, knees tucked to her chest, in front of Scorpia and her bird. “Do it.”

“What?”

“The bird. Heal it if you want to do it so badly.”

On the ground, with Scorpia still hunched over a bit, their faces are more or less level. Catra’s got on what she thinks is a more or less successful rendition of her default challenging expression, but something vulnerable seems to shift in Scorpia as she takes it in. “Okay,” she says, and then she raises her hands and begins to chant softly. The green glow starts up again and stays for a couple minutes, until with a soft, almost anticlimactic coo, the pigeon raises his newly-healed wing as if stretching it, and takes flight.

“Good,” Catra says, point proven, and then she grabs her backpack and leaves.

Which should have been the end of it, but is not. She’s on her favorite perch on the third floor balcony railing chewing moodily on her soggy cafeteria sandwich the next day at lunch. It’s not that she has to sit alone. Down below somewhere, Lonnie and Rogelio and Kyle are sitting at a table, ready to not bat a single eyelash if she were to want to join them. Usually she and Lonnie don’t mind each other half the time, she and Rogelio don’t mind each other the rest, and Kyle is fun to needle if nothing else. But what can she say? She isn’t feeling much like a people person recently. And she certainly doesn’t want to hear them mention anything to do with Adora.

Her hand twitches towards her phone then, but she resists the impulse. Adora hasn’t contacted her since last Friday, since she’d pulled the stunt with Swift Wind. The silence feels gratifyingly pointed, teeming with unsaid words. It had been miserable to wake up to voicemail after voicemail from Adora, all saying the same things— _Please. We can smooth this over. Just talk to me._ —like Adora had done something that could be smoothed over, or talked about. Infuriating to read a text from her like she thought nothing had really changed, like she hadn’t jumped at the first chance to leave and play hero, and called it a _relief_ ; revealed what she really thought about Catra and their relationship and even the damn Watcher’s Council, and believed that they could still be friends afterwards.

Still, when Catra thinks about what it might feel like for the silence between them to turn apathetic, sullen, emptied—well, she doesn’t think about it. Instead, she watches as Scorpia ascends the out-of-the-way back stairs to her balcony. She tenses, wondering what she wants now.

“Hey,” says Scorpia, and eyes the railing awkwardly before seeing a plastic bench ten feet away that she proceeds to drag over. “You don’t think anyone’s going to mind, do you?” she says, before sitting on it and pulling out a wrap like she eats up here all the time.

“Nobody’s going to mind,” says Catra. “Because usually, _nobody comes up here_.” And waits.

Scorpia scratches her head. “Well, I thought that maybe you could use some company?”

“Don’t you have anywhere else to be?” Catra asks. “Homework you’ve forgotten? Friends that are missing you about now?”

Scorpia pauses, like she’s really considering the question. “Nope!” she says finally. “Did it all last night. And I actually, uh, don’t have many of those. Friends I mean. To be honest, it’s none at all, actually?”

Catra casts around her memory for the truth of this statement. Scorpia really has always been the loner type, she remembers now, which is kind of strange because the girl seems actually offputtingly friendly. Maybe it’s the earnest desperation, which is managing to make even Catra feel a bit bad. “I don’t know why I have to explain this to you,” Catra says, deciding to try again. “But I really am not a nice person.”

“Oh, that’s good,” says Scorpia. “Because I’m not either.”

Catra doesn’t know how to respond to that. _Are you joking_ doesn’t seem like it’s going to cut it. Instead, she drags her hand down her face. They’ve wasted enough of lunch having this conversation as it is, and she is definitely not going to relocate away from her nice secluded perch. “Fine,” she says finally. “You can stay. But do _not_ try to talk to me.”

Scorpia looks at her like she’s just agreed to be the godmother of her firstborn, which is kind of disconcerting, so Catra goes back to her sub-par sandwich with a vengeance. Scorpia does manage to stay quiet the whole time, at least.

Or she does until the next day. Catra doesn’t know why she’s so surprised when she gets to her normal spot and Scorpia is already there, somehow making Catra the interloper on a location that up until yesterday she had only ever seen herself and Adora sometimes frequent. There was the one time some anemic-looking white boys were up here thinking it would be a creative new spot to smoke weed, but one glare had sent them scuttling back behind the dumpsters with very little fanfare, so she didn’t really think they counted.

Yesterday wasn’t so bad, was it? She decides to tough it out and stay to eat her lunch. Hopefully Scorpia will stop looking at her so intensely this time, and realize that there’s really nothing for her here up on this balcony with Catra, and stop coming. What she didn’t account for is the way that as soon as she sits down, Scorpia starts to babble.

“Woah,” says Catra. “I thought we agreed on no talking?”

“Oh!” says Scorpia. She starts to blush, instantly flustered. “I am _so sorry_. I thought you only meant that yesterday. Now it just seems like I can’t follow simple directions, or that I wasn’t listening to you on purpose, or that I’m not—” she has to pause here to get the next words out. They seem to take some effort. “—that I’m not a good listener. Which I am, or least I think I am, although I haven’t had that much practice because, like I said the last time, no friends—”

“Scorpia,” Catra cuts her off. “Please shut up. It’s not that fucking big of a deal. Talk if you want to, I don’t care.” Catra’s not really sure where that last part comes from, except that she knew she couldn’t stand the apologizing anymore.

Scorpia nods, somehow seeming both chastened and illuminated by Catra’s words. “Okay,” she says. “Okay, okay, okay,” and launches heroically into a speech about her breakfast, the dog she’d seen on the way to school, and a suspicious smell she keeps detecting in her English class. Catra mostly tunes it out. Scorpia tries to turn the conversation to Catra several times, but after several monosyllabic answers, she seems to take the hint for once.

This continues until Friday. After the first few days, Catra can accept that she’s not bothered by it enough to change her routine. She can’t say that she’s really listening hard to whatever Scorpia talks about—she’s not a saint, after all, as she’s made hopefully abundantly clear—but there is something not unpleasant about the enthusiastic rise and fall of her voice. Scorpia never really asks Catra for anything either, and eventually she stops seeming quite so disappointed by her one-word answers. She’s like a background noise to Catra’s solitude.

On Friday, she asks Catra, “Do you have a class after this?” Catra catches the nervousness in her voice only in retrospect.

“Physics,” she says absently. She’s thinking about Shadoweaver last night, giving her the old rigamarole about how she’d never amount to anything, nothing special, but always these days with that extra edge of threat in her voice that she used to sometimes lose around Adora. She’d been telling her that she’d better stay on the straight and narrow at school, even though Catra always more or less had, because she’d known that after she turned eighteen it wasn’t like Shadoweaver was going to be planning shit for her future. Like her grades hadn’t always been just as high as Adora’s, even if she was constantly sliding barely into a 93% in the final hour via good test-taking, whereas Adora was always a suck-up teacher’s pet from day one. It all makes her want to shake.

“Oh,” says Scorpia. “I was hoping. . . I have a free period after this. I was hoping that we could go off-campus for lunch, maybe. I have a car, we could go to the mall. Not that I wanted to assume that you’d want to go with me, but I have noticed you don’t seem to really like your cafeteria sandwiches? Maybe. . . maybe next time I could pick up some food for you that you like better?”

Scorpia slides into focus suddenly. Several pieces are starting to come together in Catra’s brain: Shadoweaver telling her to behave herself; her and Adora over winter break just a few weeks ago, talking about what they’d do once they were second-semester seniors with off-campus privileges; not that they’d never snuck off before of course, but they’d always been so busy and Adora would be worried about getting caught, and sometimes she’d get on Catra’s case too, about taking school more seriously. Adora who was as they were speaking living up her new Slayer life at Bright Moon High. The sad mushy tomatoes on her sandwich that it really does drain her soul to chew on. “No,” she says slowly. “Why don’t we go today anyways?”

Scorpia looks shocked. To be fair, this has to be the most cooperative thing Catra’s said to her all week. “But you just said you had a class later?”

Catra smiles at her. “Nothing I can’t skip,” she says, and then proceeds to drop her gross sandwich directly off the third-story balcony. “Oops,” she says. “Looks like I’ve lost my lunch. Hope that didn’t land on anyone, huh?” Then she hops off the railing and turns for the door. “Let’s go. You’re still paying.”

“Doing anything special next week?” Glimmer asks them, swirling her last curly chili cheese fry around her plate and popping it in her mouth. They’re sitting in Glimmer and Bow’s favorite diner at the mall.

Bow lights up. “Technically this is from next _next_ week, but I think it’s exciting enough for me to talk about it now.”

Glimmer rolls her eyes. “Okay, nerd, out with it already.”

“Well, next _next_ week Bright Moon Makers’ Community is having their annual jazz club meetup!”

Adora ventures a cautious, “Can you explain that?”

Bow turns to her, stars growing brighter in his eyes. “It’s only our most exciting social event of the year, in my humble opinion. I always get there early so I can chat with the other members about their new projects. . .”

“Alright, alright,” says Glimmer with annoyed fondness, clearly having heard this speech before. “You can give Adora your ranked list of your favorite Makers’ Community events _after_ we get our check. We still have almost half an hour before we have to be back at school and if we hurry we can walk around the mall before we go.”

Five minutes later, they’re out in the open air of the outdoor shops. Bow wants to visit Teavana.

“You always want to go to Teavana,” says Glimmer.

“Yeah, because they give you free samples of tea! Who would turn that down? Like I don’t always catch you sneaking seconds.”

Glimmer says something in protest, which Adora doesn’t catch, because she’s spotted Catra in a little bauble shop not thirty feet away. For that first moment it’s like she can’t remember anything is wrong. Or, that’s not right: but when she sees Catra looking slightly bored and effortlessly put-together in what Adora knows is her second-favorite pair of jeans, it feels like a train being righted on its track. Something eases in her, to know that Catra’s safe and near.

Catra begins to turn her head. Adora knows when she’s seen her because she stills completely. The strangeness of the reaction spreads everything that’s wrong between them like a field of shattered glass: their fight the day after she was called, how they haven’t spoken in two weeks, except the endless entreaties from Adora that Catra had ignored and the stupid note Catra had left in place of Swift Wind. By the time she remembers distantly that she’s technically giving Catra the silent treatment, she’s at the door of the shop without having processed moving. What else could she have done? She had already been tired of missing her, that first night they were apart.

“Hey, Adora,” says Catra.

There’s a bed of pearls in Adora’s lungs, each globular calcification of her scattered intent weighing down chest and cutting off her oxygen supply. It seems she coughs one up almost at random. “Catra,” she says, “What are you doing here?” It comes out less accusatory than strangled.

“Just came in with my new pal Scorpia,” Catra says. She reaches behind her to grab the arm of some broad-shouldered girl Adora recognizes vaguely as being from Horde. “She wanted to look at some of these ornaments. And I didn’t want to abandon her,” she says, with barbed brightness.

“Don’t you have Physics right now,” Adora finds herself saying, which even to her ears is bizarre.

“Skipped it,” says Catra lightly. “Why, are you skiving off class to be here?”

“I’m not,” says Adora. “I have a free right now. Maybe you’d know that, if you ever returned my texts.” She hears her voice squeak up high and embarrassingly loudly on _texts_ ; out of the corner of her vision she sees the owner of the shop looking over at them with a suspicious expression.

“Adora,” says Glimmer, suddenly at her shoulder. “Is someone giving you a problem?” Adora can practically feel the heat of her glare from behind her.

“It’s fine, Glimmer,” Adora says.

Catra’s laughing now. “Glitter? You really replaced me with someone named Glitter?”

“Just what the fuck is wrong with—” Glimmer starts yelling, when she’s interrupted by Catra very deliberately knocking over a glass figurine, which lands on the ground and breaks into a dozen pieces with a sharp cracking noise.

Catra gasps theatrically and steps back. “Why would you do that?” she says. She looks directly at Adora as she does, with a single-mindedness that transports them somewhere else; together, alone. Ten feet apart in a green-shadowed swamp, perhaps, Adora’s feet caught in the mud and her throat closing up with a rising tide of indifferentiable emotion.

Then Catra winks, in mocking imitation of conspiracy, and returns them to the normal flow of time. Glimmer shrieks “Us? You’re clearly the one who did it on purpose.” Bow’s arrived, and he and Scorpia seem to be saying something in conciliatory tones that absolutely cannot be heard. The store manager is approaching, and she does not look happy. Catra keeps pointing out that Glimmer and Adora are the ones who started yelling, and by the end of it they all get thrown out of the store.

She’s laughing as soon as the door closes. “You should have seen your face, Adora” she says, and then “Come on, Scorpia, we’re done here,” and leaves without looking back.

The graveyards are becoming regular haunts for Adora, and after that the narrow alleys outside of the heat-sticky nightclubs where vampires like to find their prey. The graveyards are easiest she thinks. She likes the cleanness of the victimless monster swiftly dispatched. The newborn vampires are fast, and hungry, and unskilled. Still, she gets edgy prowling the quiet graves, thinking about the dangers already out and about in the darkness. On a slow graveyard night, she thinks of the fangs poised elsewhere over a warm neck, so much less hypothetical now that she’s seen and stopped them herself. After a busy graveyard night, she looks back on the messes made of fresh burials and wonders what the hell the non-supernaturally inclined think is going on in their city.

Sometimes Lighthope takes her to a none-of-the-above place; the quiet city center at midnight, warehouses at the suburb outskirts dim in the spaced-apart street lighting. Usually there’s very little action there, which makes her uneasy. Tonight, before they’d gone out, Adora had asked Lighthope how she decided the patrols, and her face had tightened. “What do you know about cooperation between supernatural creatures?” she’d said.

“Common in small groups, but usually not for very long. With the exception of demon clans, although those are also more common outside of cities.”

“Yes,” said Lighthope. “The fractious nature of vampires and demons means that it’s unusual for large groups of them to stay organized under a single leader for any extended amount of time. Recently, however, the Council believes we may be seeing the rise of a vampire lord in Bright Moon.”

“A vampire lord?”

“Yes. Any vampire sufficiently strong and vicious to hold other creatures their thrall is dangerous on their own, but the subsequent organization of various supernatural factions in the city is moreso. We need more information, and this area seems to be a hotspot for unusual activity.”

“What do you mean by unusual activity?”

“Vampires and demons working together, most notably, which is why your goal tonight is to subdue and interrogate a member of such a group.”

Adora mulls through it as she patrols the dark city street, stalks the undulating waves of light between streetlamps, skin flush with her uneasy energy down to her toes in her boots. She hears the cry first, and then she’s running already. At the intersection she looks down one street and then the other frantically—the sound had come from somewhere to the left— _there_. A woman backed against a storefront, two vampires already with their fangs out—and a horned blue demon standing to the side of them, looking bored. As Adora nears, the woman smashes her heel into the foot of one of the vampires leaning over her, and he hisses, striking the window behind her head.

It fractures, glinting in the low light, the sound of it mirroring the shattering of the figurine Catra had dropped. All at once, Adora flashes back several dozen hours to that moment of green impossibility; her uneasy energy transmuting into heartsick fury as simply as if it had been lurking there this whole time. She lunges at one of the vampires, knocking him into the other, then winds up to punch him. He catches her arm, faster than she expects, pushing her back against the broken window. Her stake falls out of her grip as she dimly feels the crunching friction of the glass against her shoulder, and some sort of numb impact. She recovers, kicking him, and they trade blows for elastic seconds before she processes the impact on her ribs as having been from the broken window frame.

The woman begins to plead as the other vampire begins to move in on her. Adora grapples with the vampire in front of her until in a single decisive motion she switches their positions, impaling him on the angled wood of the window. He says something as he goes to dust that she can’t hear over her heart in her ears. She breaks off the piece of window and turns to drive it through the back of the remaining vampire, who dissipates even as his head is beginning to lower to feed from the woman.

“Are you alright?” Adora barely hears herself say.

The woman nods, pale-faced, and scrambles away to her waiting car only a few feet away. Adora pants for a moment more, and then Lighthope is there. _The_ _demon_ , she remembers suddenly, but he’s nowhere in sight. He must have run as soon as the fight started, she realizes distantly. She hadn’t even noticed.

“Adora,” Lighthope says, sounding disappointed. “You were supposed to save one for interrogation.”

“I—” Adora says, and can’t continue. The woman in danger, Catra and the shattering glass, the hollow pit of her brain after her thoughts had gone and left only her kinetic mania.

“Your shoulder’s injured,” Lighthope says.

Adora touches it and her hand comes away wet. There are bloody gouges there from the glass. She’s beginning to feel the pain, now that her unnamable everything is slipping away to leave her oil-slick guilt.

Days later, Adora’s sitting in her Mandarin class at school and trying not to be miserable. It’s hard. She’s in the same level that she was at Horde, but she’s definitely having a more difficult time. The vocabulary the other students have learned isn’t the same as the vocabulary she’s learned, and she suspects that even if they had used the same textbook, they’d be ahead of her old class.

She understands hard work, flash cards, putting in the hours. Usually she finds studying. . . not calming, precisely, but a channel for her nervous energy; the alternative of idleness unbearable. She doesn’t know what’s changed, but she can’t seem to summon her usual determination. Maybe it is senior slump, after all. Though another part of her surmises this may be a symptom of a surfeit and not a dearth of responsibility.

Even if she can memorize the extra words, fluency with them doesn’t come so cheaply. She’s still going to be stuck for close to an hour every weekday not comprehending what everyone else seems to understand for the foreseeable future. Adora taps her pencil against her chin, tries to tune in to what the teacher is saying, and tries not to think of Catra. It seems every winding road leads back to her, Adora thinks a little bitterly. Although probably it had always been that way, but thoughtlessly, joyfully so.

She’d picked the language because of her. Adora remembers getting their class registration forms the summer before high school and filling them out together, Catra lazing on her bed and Adora at their desk. “So?” Adora had asked.

“Yeah?”

“Were you listening? French, Spanish, or Chinese?”

“I don’t care. You choose,” Catra had said, with perfect naturalness but unnatural speed. Adora had stared at her, lying perfectly still on her stomach, not looking back. She’d remembered Catra at five, when she’d first arrived to be trained by Shadoweaver. Sometimes she would slip mid-sentence into a Mandarin phrase, and then slip right out back into English. Afterwards, usually, realizing, she would wrinkle up her nose and dredge up a translation. But sometimes she couldn’t come up with anything, and Adora would guess word after word as she shook her head. _busy? noisy? loud? no, that’s not it._

“Chinese,” Adora had said, a little bit tentatively.

Catra had rested her head in her hands, and turned finally to look at her. “Okay,” she’d said, chewing the inside of her lip. “If that’s what you want.” But she’d smiled.

Adora had liked to watch her in class. Sometimes, the teacher would say something, pronounce some new character, and she would see something in Catra’s expression—not a softening, precisely. Maybe the discovery of a tenderness, felt without pain. Adora wondered if she was remembering her parents. She couldn’t read any better than Adora, but she always helped her with her accent, tapping her pencil against her nose when she’d get something wrong. Adora puts her own pencil, end pressed against her chin, down, feeling the stupid urge to look aside. The bell rings then, mercifully, and she goes to lunch.

Bow and Glimmer are waiting for her already. “Are you alright?” Bow asks as soon as she arrives. “You seem kind of tense.”

“I’m fine,” Adora grits out. She unclenches her hands around her tray, takes a deep breath. “Having a tough time in Chinese again.”

“Wanna talk about it?” Bow asks sympathetically.

“I was thinking about Catra,” Adora says, realizing only as she says it that she is saying it, and also that it is a complete non sequitur. She feels Bow and Glimmer looking at each other.

“Right,” says Glimmer. “Catra, the girl who got us kicked out of the mall who has some weird beef against you and by extension us? Yeah, I see why thinking about her would make you tense. Hell, it’s making me tense.”

“She’s not—” Adora tries. “She’s my best friend,” she tries again, because that still has to be true, right? Surely three weeks of icy treatment can’t undo twelve years of—she doesn’t have anything to describe it. _Best friend._ All her words feel at once inadequate and fragile. “Can we talk about something else?”

She feels Bow and Glimmer _looking_ at each other again. She wishes they would stop, or at least she wonders when they’re going to develop _looks_ with her. “Okay,” says Bow at last. “ _As_ I was saying, I think that Entrapta—Adora that’s the Robotics teacher, _yes_ she lets us call her by her first name!—may be on track to take over the world. Or at least the county.”

“What?” Adora says.

“It sounds crazy, but I swear she has access to all these, like, databases that can’t be legal. She pulled the addresses of all the teachers leading competing schools, and somehow finagled their credit card purchase history for the last two months? At this point I don’t think there’s anything she can’t find out if she wants to.”

Bow smiles encouragingly at Adora as he says it, and as he opens his mouth to continue she sits and lets herself breathe.

Lighthope assigns her her first solo patrol a few nights later. “Sometimes you’re going to have to fight alone,” she’d explained. She drops Adora off at one graveyard, where she’s supposed to spend an hour before walking twenty minutes to another graveyard. Adora wonders if it can be normal to have this many places to store dead bodies in such a small radius.

She polishes off three vampires in the first half of her night. She’s getting better at this, she thinks. _Slayer,_ the last vamp had grunted, and she had the presence of mind to raise an eyebrow and quip _So you have heard of me_ before sliding her stake home into his chest. She’d felt pretty smooth, she’s not going to lie. Forwards and onwards, she thinks, and heads back out onto the street.

Most of the route cuts through her old neighborhood. She can’t say it feels nostalgic; only familiar. There’s the froyo place she and Catra had gone to only a month ago, over break. There’s the dingy office supply store they’d gotten their binders and line paper from twelve years running.

There’s Catra, ahead of her, back turned, leaning idly on the traffic light as she waits for the color to turn. Adora holds her breath. It doesn’t feel quite like it did at the mall. Her body remembers at once both a lifetime of comfort and three weeks of pain; holds it all simultaneously in her chest and her limbs.

The light changes. Catra slips her phone into her pocket and starts to cross the street to the left, on what Adora knows is her route home. Adora ought to wait and catch her breath, watch the purple evening gloom slowly swallow up Catra’s dark head in its wide-toothed maw. Then continue straight on her path to the cemetery, not bothering to call out to someone who’s made it so clear she doesn’t want to see her. Adora feels as she had in class the other day the impulse to turn her gaze churlishly away.

As she does, she catches out of the corner of her eye—was that a flash of blue? She doesn’t see anything when she looks back, but the silhouette of it had resembled, she thought, the demon from the other night. She remembers Lighthope’s words. _The rise of a vampire lord in Bright Moon_. She thinks of the woman she’d barely managed to save. Catra’s out late and still a good eight blocks from home. Adora’s hastily following her down the street before she can think any harder about it.

She trails her from a distance, trying to be inconspicuous but to still keep her mostly in her range of vision. Adora watches as Catra flicks her hair over her shoulder, and sees the outline of a paper bag in her arms. She must have gone to the corner store for groceries.

Ever since they were kids, whenever they were both sent to the store Adora always picked the heavier bags to carry. It made her feel useful. Adora wonders what Catra had bought. Was it heavy? She rounds the corner into the alley they’ve always taken as a shortcut and suddenly startles to see that Catra’s not there. She’s whipping her head around, frantic, when suddenly a shadowed blur launches out of an alcove, pushing Adora’s back against the brick behind her.

“Why were you followi—oh. Hey, Adora,” says Catra, her forearm against Adora’s windpipe. The tension doesn’t diffuse now that they’ve recognized each other; it seems to narrow instead. They’re both breathing heavily; Catra pulls back enough that she’s no longer hurting Adora. There’s a light somewhere down the alleyway that’s putting hard points of brightness in Catra’s eyes, a gleam in the dark-wood fall of her long hair.

“So?” says Catra, raising an eyebrow. “Tell a girl why she’s getting followed into a dark alley at night.” She still has Adora trapped against the wall. It would be easy, with her superior strength, for Adora to free herself. She doesn’t know why she can’t, why she’s suddenly afraid of her own two hands.

“I was worried for you.”

“What?”

“There’s—” Adora runs her tongue between her teeth and lips, stalling. “There’s a vampire lord in town. They’re getting more organized. I thought—it’s late.”

Something crystallizes in Catra’s expression. “Oh, of course,” she says lightly. “Saw me alone and just had to come rescue me. Didn’t we talk about this already? Playing hero?”

“It’s not—I just wanted to protect you!”

The arm against her throat tightens, probably not consciously. “Well, don’t! You never have!” Catra spits out the words like they’re stones pried free from her stomach. Adora shudders without knowing why. She feels Catra trembling too, until she seems to regain herself. Catra casts a glance back out onto the street and smirks. “Looks like the only thing that came after me was you, and I guess we know how that one turned out. Go home, Adora. I don’t need your help, so there’s nothing for you here, is there?” There’s accusation in her voice, at the center of all that airy looseness.

Something about Catra’s tone, maybe how she’s pretending to be above it all, or else just—something about Catra, the familiar edge of her dug long ago into Adora’s skin, dissolves any attempt Adora can make to temper her anger. “How can you say that when you’re the one who started ignoring me? Like you’re not the one who turned your back on me just like that? Why do you have to be so—so stubborn?”

“You don’t know anything about me.” Catra yells, not like she means it but like she means to say it. Adora flinches despite herself. “You’ve proved that well enough in the last ten minutes with your bullshit protection. Pretty impressive actually, for someone who shared a room with me for a decade, but I guess you’ve always been oblivious.” She pulls away from the wall, takes one step back, two. Adora feels it as a loss. They watch each other as Catra scrambles to pick up her dropped groceries. She turns to go, then pauses to toss her parting words back over her shoulder. “You know, I am glad I saw you tonight, if I only so that I could tell you that I hate you in person,” she says, and then she’s gone.

Later, Adora will marvel that everything happened at the time it did; the call coming in at four during the break in marching band practice when Glimmer checked her phone, on an afternoon when Lighthope had a backlog of book returns to process. Adora’s staying late at the library waiting for her when Glimmer barges in, still holding her tuba.

“Adora!” Glimmer says, her face pale, the words tumbling out of her like loose sand down a slope. “It’s Bow—he—I just got his call, and my mom’s completely off the grid right now for this stupid fucking moon-casting rite in Australia, because I told her a million times I’d be fine alone for two days, and—"

“Woah,” says Adora. “Slow down. What’s happening? Isn’t Bow at his, uh, Creators’ Club meetup?”

“Maker’s Community,” Glimmer says automatically. And then: “He was, but then the jazz club they were in got held up by demons! He and a bunch of other people got taken somewhere, but he doesn’t know where, and their phones were all confiscated.”

“What?” says Adora. “Wait, how did he contact you then?”

Glimmer waves her hand. “Some weird prototype someone in the Maker’s Community brought to the meetup. It doesn’t matter. We need to save him!”

Lighthope is there now, tense-lipped. “Demons?” she says. “Did he say anything about what they looked like?”

“Umm he said there were some. . . small blue ones? With horns? And larger green demons that. . . also had horns, but maybe also forked tails?”

Lighthope nods gravely. “Different species then, that don’t usually work together.” She addresses Adora. “Probably a team of diurnal demons put together by the vampire lord that we’ve been suspecting is operating in Bright Moon. Usually it would be more convenient to strike at night. There has to be a reason. I would wager. . .”

“What?” says Adora. She’d gone clammy at the words _vampire lord_ , thinking of the vamps she’d failed to interrogate a few days ago, the _blue horned demon_ she’d let get away. If she’d been calmer, if she’d actually succeeded at her job, would they have known about this attack? Would Bow be safe right now? She remembers him just today at lunch, making her choke on her juice as he told her about Sea Hawk’s new plan to win back Mermista.

“. . . probably they were taking sacrifices for a time-sensitive ritual. Did Bow mention anything like that?”

Glimmer furrows her brow. “He didn’t have much time to talk. He had to hang up because some demons were coming around to check on them and tie them up. They were in the back of a van being transported somewhere, he said.”

“Think carefully, Glimmer. Any details that seem like they could be related to a ritual could be important.”

“He mentioned something about. . . a Harvest?”

Lighthope’s eyes narrow. “Harvest. . . Yes. I have heard of that before.” She pauses, thinking; Adora fills with relief. She’s never seen Lighthope fail to locate the right book after remembering something. Her memory is encyclopedic, almost computer-like in that way. Lighthope stalks over to the shelves at the back of the library where she keeps her private collection. She thumbs through the volumes before revealing a little worn leather-bound text with metal-capped edges. Adora and Glimmer stand behind her, watching helplessly. “Here,” she says finally. “The Harvest is a ritual that can only be performed once every century, and we’re due for another opportunity. . . tonight at sunset. It’s magic through which the life forces of a dozen victims can be drained to strengthen someone from afar, especially useful if the target is trapped somewhere.”

Glimmer’s hand roots itself at Adora’s elbow. “Anything else?” she says. “Anything that could help us find him?”

“Yes,” Lighthope continues. “The ritual can only be performed under very specific circumstances. Somewhere the ground has been consecrated by ah. . . the brewing of alcoholic beverages for at least seven years, near or on a location that a body of water used to lie. The good news it that it can’t be too far from where Bow was last, considering the time-frame.”

Glimmer groans. “How are we going to find a place like that before”—she checks her phone. “Sunset happens in an hour? Who could possibly find out—wait,” she says. She catches Adora’s gaze, both of them trying to recall why those words sound so familiar before reaching the realization simultaneously.

Luckily, it’s only an hour after school and Entrapta’s still in her classroom. Glimmer barges in without knocking, fists clenched at her sides. “We have a question for you,” she says immediately.

“There’s this, uh, group project? And we need to know—” Adora tries unconvincingly, but it doesn’t matter. Entrapta’s already looking up from where she’s tinkering with a circuit board at her desk.

“Oh?” she says brightly. She’s younger than Adora would have expected for a teacher, looking straight out of college with her bright purple hair. “I love questions. As long as they’re interesting!”

“We’re wondering if you could find for us anywhere within an hour’s drive of Acre Jazz House where alcohol has been brewed for more than seven years, on or near ground that used to have a body of water,” Glimmer demands almost threateningly, not at all like she’s here to ask a teacher for a favor.

Entrapta blinks at them, seeming nonplussed by Glimmer’s tone. “Why? Is this for a spell?”

Glimmer and Adora look at each other. “What do you mean for a spell?” Adora asks carefully.

“Just since seven years is a common number for location requirements for magic, and the flow of water is essential in many traditions of—oh, do you mean how I know about magic? Honestly, the real question is how so many people don’t know about it! I’ve been thinking about running some tests recently on how many supernatural occurrences the average person can ignore. . . anyways, magitech is a particular interest of mine!”

“Magi. . .” Glimmer begins, and then: “Can’t you just tell us if you can find the place or not? It’s for Bow. He’s been kidnapped by demons that are going to try to sacrifice him to a vampire lord in a ritual, and we need to find him before sunset.”

Entrapta blinks. “Of course. Bow is one of my best students. Make sure to tell him that when you rescue him,” she says earnestly, and swivels in her desk chair to face her laptop. Adora and Glimmer barely have time to doubt her before she whoops “Aha!” and tells them, “there’s a brewery at the corner of 57th and Sycamore, under where a section of the Featherfield stream used to run. Actually, it’s called Feather Field Brews.”

Entrapta looks mildly taken aback when Glimmer grasps both her hands in her own. “Thank you. So much,” she says, and then she and Adora are running out the door as quickly as they came.

It’s nearing five when they reach the building, twenty minutes from sundown, and as they approach the doors to the facility they can already hear the chanting. Adora looks through the crack between the doors. A dozen people huddle on their knees, arms and legs bound—Adora looks over each person on the line until she spots, there at the end—Bow, looking frazzled but otherwise unharmed. “I see him,” she whispers.

Behind her, Glimmer, who had insisted on coming with them in no uncertain terms, lets out long-held breath. Adora keeps observing. There are six demons in the brewery, wearing classic draping cult-like robes, standing in a line facing both the sacrifices and the door. She’ll have to distract them somehow. The dying sun catches her eye coming through the. . . skylight behind the demons. Perfect. Adora’s got her plan now; she can fix this. She tests the door in front of her, which to her dismay she finds locked. Before she can bite her lip, Glimmer pipes up.

“I can unlock it,” she says. “Those were some of the first spells I learned. Never know when you have to break in somewhere.” She smiles shakily. 

“Okay,” says Adora. “I’ll go in through the skylight, make a distraction. You. . .” she pauses, suddenly reluctant.

Lighthope is already nodding assuredly. “Glimmer and I will come in through this door and get everyone out safely while the demons are distracted.”

Nothing for it, then. She finds the spot where a combination of rain gutter and roughly laid brick creates sufficient leverage for her to climb up to the roof, pushing away the memory of Catra teaching her this trick. There’s some corroded grating over the skylight, which she easily rips aside. She takes one last look at the demons, warped through the dusty gray glass, before slamming her boot through the skylight.

It shatters with a satisfying smash, falling down behind the suddenly startled demons. “Hey uglies!” Adora calls down through the hole, and then jumps through to land in a crouch on one of the tall fermentation tanks on the brewery floor. “Look here!” she says, and they do. She leaps down to kick one green-skinned demon right between the horns as she sees Glimmer and Lighthope come in the doors.

They’re all on her at once, much to her relief as she watches out of the corners of her vision Glimmer and Lighthope cutting the ties of the sacrifices and shepherding them outside. She tries to remember the weaknesses that Lighthope had explained to her in the car; the soft place between the vertebra for her to slide in her knife. The first demon she’d gotten with her kick was laid flat on the floor with the momentum of it, but the other five circle her. She decides to get the jump on them and strides forward to tussle with one of the smaller blue demons, hoping that in close-quarters the other demons won’t have the coordination to attack her without attacking their allies.

A blow she isn’t expecting hits the back of her head. Damn, these things hit harder than the average vampire. She turns, slicing with her knife, but only makes contact with the hard scaly armor of a demon’s nape instead of pliable flesh, which has to be one of the least satisfying sensations in the world.

This time she sees the punch coming out of the corner of her vision and ducks; to her glee, it hits the demon behind her instead. The two demons, evidently not much bonded by their mutual experience attempting to conduct ritual sacrifice, actually start shoving each other around. Adora lets herself have an abbreviated mental cheer before moving on to knee the leathery-skinned blue demon before her in the groin. He hisses at her, unsheathing wicked-sharp claws.

Then something shifts. A plumed tail of a cloud, far away in the darkened sky. In a moment it becomes very clear that it is night; that the sacrifices are out of the building, that the demons have missed their window of opportunity. Like that, it ends. The demon Adora’s fighting clicks something at her under his breath that makes her eyes widen, and then they’re all fleeing. Adora thinks for a moment of pursuit, but then she remembers Glimmer, Lighthope, Bow, and the rest of the kidnapped victims had gone out the opposite door.

As soon as she exits the building, she’s treated to the sight of Glimmer, arms wrapped around Bow’s torso, looking as if she’s trying to suffocate him. “Never do that again!” she’s exclaiming. “I was so worried.”

Bow’s chuckling. “I couldn’t help it,” he says, and then he spots Adora. He spreads out an arm in invitation, and Adora steps in to the hug. “Don’t worry,” he says into their hair. “I knew my best girls were going to come rescue me.”

Adora can’t help the smile that bubbles up onto her face then, effervescent as a cherry coke, even as the words she’d overheard from the demon moments prior chase themselves in circles around her mind: _Lord Hordak’s fury will be tenfold._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading everyone! once again, my tumblr is [here](https://jade-ellsworth.tumblr.com) \+ feel free to drop me a line there or in the comments! next chapter should be up in around 1-2 weeks. (maybe less b/c its one i’m quite excited for…)
> 
> PLUS i forgot to mention this last time but huge thanks to my friend [ross](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FailedALIAS/pseuds/FailedALIAS) for beta-ing both this chapter and the last, waging, as he commented on my google doc, his "eternal war against my metaphors". and to my gf [emily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/outlaw_baby/pseuds/outlaw_baby) for listening to me talk about the plot of this story ad nauseam and reading all my scenes as i write them hot off the presses while they're in their crappiest form.
> 
> links go to their ao3 accounts if u wanna check out their stories! ross if you want to read, uh, a fic where spinel from steven universe has an unhealthy codependent relationship with his OC, which, i know sounds incredibly niche, but it's actually a thoughtful exploration of the ways in which people's trauma-derived neuroses can interact in harmful ways. its also not even slightly horny, so don't even think about it. and emily if you want to read lovely lovely almost prose-poetry pieces about women and grief and disconnection and re-connection with one's body and this lush profundity of images that are sometimes incomprehensible but always are just right. and the healing powers of lesbianism.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> or: four sad backstories, three emotional conversations, two hard-to-find magical books, and one prophecy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry everyone who subscribed to this for clickbaiting you this is the THIRD time i’ve tried to update this fic to get it to show up in the tag. problematique.
> 
> anyway, welcome back! this is super self-indulgent, but because we’re reaching the end of an arc, (sort of… it’s actually the next chapter) and it’s no longer spoilery, you may listen to my [playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW516TEOB3qJ-OGrUl-Q2x9v6XaxtKFWK) for this section of the fic if you so wish!
> 
> song list, in case youtube deletes some videos: summer skeletons; radical face | two birds, regina spektor | teeth, mirah + thao | landfill, daughter | ruin your night, sorcha richardson | vampire smile, kyla la grange | anthems for a seventeen year old girl, broken social scene | eyes on fire, blue foundation

Catra’s sitting in bed idly finishing her Calculus homework when Shadoweaver comes in. Her mind had been, for once, not unpleasantly absent; so much so that she doesn’t consciously hear the approaching footsteps and only raises her head, feeling the thrumming beat of unease, in the moment before the door opens.

“Catra,” says Shadoweaver from the door, in her gravel and tar voice. Catra resists the urge to stand, or wish she’d been at the desk. Shadoweaver’s commented acerbically on Catra’s habit of occasionally working in bed often enough that Catra had started doing it more often out of spite. Honestly, Catra’s not sure what she expected when she’d bought Adora and her one not-very-large desk to share. Yet despite the intentionality of Catra’s position, Shadoweaver’s derisive gaze makes her feel suddenly self-conscious under the blankets.

“Yes, Shadoweaver?” Catra says. Her mind’s back in her body now, painstaking in its granular perception of the moments as they pass. Since Adora’s been gone, Shadoweaver has bothered less with Catra’s training, and she’s actually has more time to herself. Conversely, whenever Shadoweaver does come around it’s always, always, bad news.

“I’m disappointed,” Shadoweaver says levelly. “I had thought common thievery was beneath even you.”

“What?”

“So you haven’t seen my Elemental Compendium? I wouldn’t find it anywhere, were I to search through your things?”

Just an unsubstantiated accusation, then. Shadoweaver probably doesn’t even buy herself that Catra’s taken it, is only here because she’s reached the _blame Catra!_ section of her problem-solving checklist. Catra almost rolls her eyes. “I don’t want anything to do with your books,” she grits out.

The room seems to grow a little colder, but all Shadoweaver does is say “See that it stays that way.” She flicks a nail, letting an orange spark fly off it, and exits Catra’s room, probably to get back to her sanctum. (Or at least, the room she always insists everyone refer to as her sanctum, but which is probably marked on the floor plans as “Dingy Study Model #2”). She’s plotting something new in there, now that Adora’s gone. Catra doesn’t care so long as it keeps her out of her hair.

She doesn’t even try to get back to her homework, just shoves her notebook closed and resolves to deal with it during homeroom. She had half a question left, anyways.

The next morning, Catra’s putting away her cereal bowl, extricating it from the clutter of papers and old mail on the breakfast table, when she sees it, hiding under a loaf of bread. _Elemental Compendium_. She dismisses the thought of telling Shadoweaver practically before it appears. Knowing her, she’d take it as a sign that Catra actually had been hiding it the whole time or something. After a moment’s contemplation, Catra concludes that there’s no point being blamed for something if she’s not going to do it, and sticks the thing in her backpack before heading out the door.

She forgets about the book all morning (probably while scrambling to finish her homework), but it’s started to weigh down her backpack by lunch, sitting up on her balcony railing as Scorpia joins her. Now that she’s taken it, it’s not safe to take it back. She could read it, but magic books are always pretty dry, and she doesn’t have any aptitude for spells. She could just—throw it away, she supposes. Seems kind of anticlimactic though—

“Catra?” Had Scorpia asked her a question? Catra usually paid a little better attention than this: enough to know when she was about to be addressed. It helps that after the first week Scorpia had seemed to relax, stop rambling quite so much. Some days it was damn near comfortable. But Catra had been too distracted with the—hm.

“Listen, Scorpia,” Catra says, reaching into her bag. “I have something for you,” and she pulls out the book.

No sooner has the gilt binding become apparent than Scorpia freezes, eyes widening. “A spellbook?” she says. “I shouldn’t,” she says. . . tremulous? Hopeful? Catra can’t quite read her tone. 

“Why not?” says Catra. “Don’t you do magic? Maybe there’s some spell in here you can cast to disguise yourself the next time you need to heal a pigeon in a very public place.”

She hasn’t said anything to make Scorpia less uneasy. “There could be something dangerous in there, Wildcat,” she says. “Why aren’t you worried that I could hurt you?”

Catra bristles. “This again? I already told you I’m not scared of magic. Forget it,” she says, already taking the book back. Maybe she can just burn it, unless it’s going to emit some weird vapors.

“Magic killed my parents,” Scorpia says. It doesn’t feel like a complete thought, but she already seems surprised she’s said so much.

Catra stops, sighs. She’s really in deep now. “Yeah?” she says, as carefully as she gets these days.

“They were witches,” Scorpia says after a pause. She also sounds careful, not choked up or even rambling, which Catra is thankful for. “It was some sort of accident with a new spell they were trying, which just totally exploded. Green fire everywhere. I tried to put it out, which is how I got the scars on my hands,” she says, nodding down at them; the petal-red patterns of her palms. She sounds relieved when she explains that part, like she’s preempting the inevitable, even though Catra really hadn’t had any plans to mention them.

“Shit sucks,” Catra says, breathing slowly.

“I was ten,” says Scorpia. “It was a long time ago. They don’t hurt anymore, though it did some kind of nerve damage and that’s why my handwriting is so bad—whatever. The point is, I should know better than anyone that magic is dangerous. My grandparents remind me all the time that it hurts people.”

Catra turns her head. For once, she’s the one looking, and Scorpia’s eyes are fixed away. “So why do you do it then?” she asks, feeling genuinely curious.

“Sometimes it’s convenient, like with the bird,” she says slowly. “Like, I couldn’t just leave it there. But also. . . it reminds me of my moms. When I do magic I feel close to them. I remember them teaching me the words, ruffling my hair when I would get it right. I can’t help doing it. Isn’t that really bad? That I keep abusing this power, even though I know how dangerous it is?”

“No,” says Catra immediately, and then has to pause to wait for her next words to come to her. “You know,” she says. “I know a thing or two about dead parents.”

Scorpia realizes what she means right away. “I’m sorry—” she begins.

Catra cuts her off. “Don’t be,” she says. “What did you say? I was five. It’s been a long time. Spent a couple months in a group home, then got fostered—” she trips over the word sometimes, the implication that Shadoweaver is her foster mother. She’s never even been _Adora’s_ foster mother. She’s always just been their Watcher. “—by the shittiest woman alive. You know what I learned in all that? If something feels good, you should do it. If you’ve got power, then use it.” She drops the book into Scorpia’s lap. There, she’s gotten rid of it, one way or another. “Read it or don’t, but those are my two cents.”

Scorpia thumbs the cover, gentle as the wind off a chime. The book creaks as she opens it slowly, like a child peering behind an unfamiliar door. “You really got this for me?” she says. She sounds almost giddy now, and she’s smiling.

Catra sniffs. “It was convenient. Don’t get used to it,” she says, not sure if it’s to be truthful or to be cruel. Then she turns back away.

Why do books on the supernatural have to be so hard to find? Adora gives a resentful glare to the bookstore shelf in front of her and sighs as she peers down at the next neatly-written but impossibly tiny title on the list Lighthope had assigned to her. She’s gone through about a quarter of the list since the Harvest a week ago, when they’d confirmed the name and existence of the vampire lord in Bright Moon. She despairs reaching the end of the list, but not as much as she despairs reaching the end of the list not knowing anything more than when she began.

She squints at the next entry again. Is this supposed to be _Demons of the Sumyrian Coast_ or _Demons of the Sumgrian Coast_? She’s almost resolved herself to ask for clarification when Bow appears behind her. 

“Whatcha looking for?” he asks casually.

“I don’t know!” says Adora, trying not to sound frantic. “Do you think this is a _y_ or a _g_?”

Bow looks down at the paper for a moment and then shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. It’ll be in the same place either way. Come on, the geographical section is over there,” he says, and then leads her two shelves over. His eyes scan the books for a moment, before he steps up three rungs onto the nearby ladder. “Aha!” he exclaims shortly thereafter, and reaches out to extricate the proper tome before leaping back down. He presents the book to Adora with a flourish. “For you, mademoiselle,” he says.

Adora laughs as she takes it. She examines the green of the cover for a moment; apparently, it’s actually the _Sumjrian_ Coast. “You’re so good at this,” she tells Bow.

Bow shrugs, smiling. “Well, this _is_ my Dads’ bookshop. I basically grew up here, of course I know how the place is organized.”

They round the corner and spot the sturdy oaken table that they’ve staked out for their research evening. Entrapta’s sitting cross-legged on the table, where she insists the wi-fi is marginally better. She doesn’t look up as Bow and Adora come in, too lost in her project. She’d explained it when she’d arrived; something about web scraping possible vampire sightings and location data analysis in order to algorithmically identify upcoming activity hotspots? Adora hadn’t understood it at all, but she knows Lighthope had been impressed.

Lighthope’s sitting to Entrapta’s right, leafing through some medieval manuscript and holding a cup of tea in the picture of perfect compose; a sharp contrast from Glimmer across from her, surrounded by coffee cups of various degrees of emptiness and bright pink post-it notes, looking like she’s about to tear her hair out as she pores over her spellbook. She brightens as Bow and Adora approach.

“Found your book?”

“With a little help from Bow,” Adora says, sliding into her chair and its associated nest of painstaking notes and highlighters.

Glimmer rests her head on the table; not with frustration, just plaintiveness softened with humor. “What do you think are the odds that book’s going to be the one that tells us specifically who the fuck Lord Hordak is and what his weaknesses are?”

Bow catches Adora’s slightly wilting gaze. “Don’t worry,” he says, reassuringly. “He’s just one shriveled undead man whose ass you’re going to kick to the curb.”

“Actually,” Lighthope says, not looking up from her book, “The position of vampire lord is gender-neutral, so Lord Hordak is not necessarily male.”

Entrapta finally seems to notice Bow and Adora’s arrival, though her fingers don’t stop tapping as she speaks. “Although notably vampires are one of the supernatural creatures that have a conception of gender most similar to that of humans, considering that they were human before they turned! Most similar, but not the same. . .” she trails off, clearly considering the merits of such a research topic. Adora feels a sudden fondness. She’d wondered if it would be strange to work with a teacher, when Entrapta had said she wanted to help them investigate vampire activity. But she doesn’t think that Entrapta has the words to say _If you just applied yourself_ or the ability to look _not-angry!-just-disappointed_ , even if she’d ever wanted to.

Glimmer flicks Bow affectionately on the shoulder. “You don’t think a woman could lead the undead?”

Bow splutters. “What? No, I—is this the future that liberals want?”

George emerges then from the front of shop. “Glad to see you’re having fun researching!” he says. He rests a fatherly hand on Bow’s shoulder. “Friends of Bow are always welcome in our shop. I’m afraid we’re closing now, although if you would like you may take a book and bring it back tomorrow.”

Adora glances down at _Demons of the Sumjrian Coast_ , which she’s only barely cracked open, and represses a sigh. When she looks up though, Bow and Glimmer seem to have acquired one of their intermittent, irrepressible bursts of enthusiasm.

“Research sleepover?” asks Bow.

“Research sleepover?” echoes Glimmer.

Adora glances over at Lighthope. Her mouth is pressed into a thin line, which Adora can’t read. The contents of her chest start to gel over, but when Lighthope speaks it seems to be more with amusement than anything else. “Well, it is Saturday night, Adora. No training until noon tomorrow.”

“Research sleepover,” confirms Adora.

They actually manage to get a fair amount of work done, sprawled out together on Glimmer’s bedroom floor. Adora gets halfway through the book on Sumjrian Coast demons, managing to identify one of the demon types she’s been seeing more frequently now on her patrols, before they all push their papers away and give up sometime after midnight.

“Thank you for doing this with me,” Adora says, feeling suddenly very earnest. They’re all lying on their backs on the carpet with the lights off, staring up at the little glow-in-the-dark stars on Glimmer’s ceiling, which somehow look cute rather than tacky.

“Anytime, Adora,” Bow says.

“What kind of friends would we be if we let you drown yourself in dusty old books alone? We basically had to.” Glimmer continues.

No, you didn’t, Adora wants to explain. She was the Slayer, and defeating Hordak was her job. But before she can say anything, Bow gasps. “That’s the perfect segue into revealing my name for us! It went through a lot of revisions—I have a whole list of rejected ones. Maybe I shouldn’t say rejected, I’m sure they’d be perfect for some other crew of friends? But in the end I decided to go classic. How do you guys feel about being the Best Friends Squad? We can call ourselves BFS for short.”

“We can’t go with the Glimmer Group?” Glimmer teases, but warmly.

“No—I like it. I like Best Friends Squad,” Adora says. She feels warmly too. Her words about how Bow and Glimmer have done so much more than they had to melt in her mouth, come out sideways. “I’ve never had a sleepover before. This is my first one. Guess I’ve had a lot of firsts recently,” she says instead.

“Is it a big adjustment?” Bow asks. “Not just the Slayer stuff. Moving schools, living with Lighthope.”

Glimmer laughs. “I know what Bow’s actually curious about. He asked me the other day if I thought Lighthope had that stiff-upper-lip British thing going on all the time, or if she thinks she has to ramp it up around us because she’s the librarian.”

“I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her smile!” Bow protests. “Not that she. . . has to. . . it’s just weird. Glimmer’s slandering me. I meant my question, Adora.”

“I know you did,” Adora says. “And, um, it could be worse.” She’s never been good at—thinking about her feelings. She feels some pressure descending on her now, in the dark, despite the warmth.

“Especially with a little help from your friends, right?” says Bow. “I’m glad we could induct you into the sacred sleepover rite of talking until 2 A.M.”

The pressure in the air, over her skin, gains acuteness; shape. It hovers over her, half-formed with reaching limbs. “Yeah,” Adora manages. She’s remembering Catra now, all the nights they’d stayed up late whispering to each other, nestled in a single bed. She hasn’t seen or heard from her since their disastrous alleyway confrontation almost two weeks ago. She’s been _busy_ , tiring herself out too much in between school and homework and patrol and figuring out what to do about the imminent threat of a vampire organization overtaking Bright Moon to lie awake thinking about Catra. Instead, she’s reminded of her by accident half-a-dozen times a day: when she spots her favorite scent of soap, when the girl in her Physics class that has hair a little like hers explains a problem, when Adora’s mind supplies a joke only funny because of her. The sudden ache of remembering has become no less painful, but routine, almost familiar, which is worse.

Adora doesn’t realize the comfort of the silence she’s been lying in until she hears the soft ease with which Glimmer breaks it, like a parting of clouds. “Adora?” she says. Casting a stone into the dark.

“Yeah?”

“How long were you a Potential? I know you had another Watcher before Lighthope.” Under the purple and green nebula of Glimmer’s ceiling, surrounded by books and papers that had been abrading their skulls all day, her question doesn’t seem abrupt at all. It makes a sleepy sort of sense.

“All my life, that I can remember,” says Adora. “The Watchers found me really young. My parents gave me up to be trained by Shadoweaver when I was a baby.”

“Oh,” says Glimmer. “That’s really tough—I can’t imagine.”

“No, it’s fine, I don’t remember them.” That’s mostly true. Sometimes she thinks—maybe a song, or the impression of something soft against her cheek. But she tries not to think about it too often. She’s afraid she’ll wear out the feeling somehow, or that it won’t be there when she reaches for it. “And considering everything that’s happened, it was really for the best.” That’s what Shadoweaver had always said, when Adora was small, small enough to ask about her parents. Your parents knew that you were meant for greater things, and that I could help you achieve them. They were doing what was best for you and for the world. If you want to honor their sacrifice, you need to train hard. And she was the Slayer now, so Shadoweaver had been right.

Glimmer hums a bit under her breath. “I don’t remember my dad very much either,” she says. “I do have this memory of his voice behind me while he pushed me on the swings, and like, his beard scratching my face when he would kiss my cheek. But he just disappeared one day when I was three. We don’t know what happened to him. My mom thinks that he’s out there somewhere doing his best every day to get back to us, because that’s how much he loves us, and sometimes I believe her.” Out of the corner of her eye, Adora sees Bow reach out to hold Glimmer’s hand. “I know it’s not the same, but I’m sure your parents also love you very much. And I know—I know—” Adora reaches her own hand out, slowly. Glimmer has a small palm, but a lot of grip strength. She finishes her sentence with a surprising viciousness. “I know that that doesn’t make the loss go away.”

They lie together like that for a while, thinking about missing pieces and holding hands under the plastic stars.

She senses danger approaching as she stands still in the churchyard under the shadowed nighttime rustling of the trees, so when she hears the hissed _Slayer_ , she isn’t surprised. “Who’s asking,” she says, turning, but she still sucks her breath in when she sees five vampires arrayed in a semi-circle before her. For a moment she just takes them in. Clearly they know who she is already, and clearly they’re organized. They’re almost certainly related to Lord Hordak.

She’s been the Slayer for well over a month now, and she could take five new vampires without an excess of worry. Older, more powerful ones, though, as seems more likely if they’ve survived long enough to be recruited by Hordak, will be less easy. She tightens her grip on the stake in her hand, and leaps towards the vamp closest to her. He dodges her first immediate strike towards his heart, but she catches his loudly choreographed left hook, pushing on his arm until she hears the bone crack. Huh. Doesn’t seem so powerful after all.

The heat of the fight is starting to thrum in her; she kicks the vamp and sends it stumbling towards the feet of one of its brethren before turning to dodge the strike of a vampire who had been trying to sneak up on her from behind. _Not today_. In fact this vampire has so overextended herself in her attack that Adora spots an opening to stake her heart. _And not ever_ , she thinks with satisfaction as her stake slides home and the vampire goes up in dust. The vampire whose arm she’d broken before has recovered, but his rhythm is obviously off and she makes short work of him as well.

“One against three,” Adora says. “I’m feeling better and better about my odds.” She’s satisfied to hear her words carry only a hint of breathlessness. The remaining vampires circle her for only a moment before one of them breaks rank to attack her. Another follows. They’re a bit better than the two vampires who Adora just took out, but not by much. It’s enough that Adora spends some time just dodging and parrying their attacks before she spots her opening.

She doesn’t quite remember the afternoon she and Catra must have spent learning this grapple, but the shape of it is impressed on her body. In one smooth movement she sweeps the feet out from under one vampire before turning her momentum into a jab against the other. As quickly as she can, she’s staking the vamp that’s fallen in the back before whirling around to stake the other while he’s still doubled over.

There was one more, she knows. Where had the last one gone? But as she turns the last vampire is already there in her space, much too close for safety. By the way she moves, the glide in her step, Adora can tell she’s older than the others. _Fuck_ , she thinks, but before she can react the vampire’s already got her pinned against the tree behind her.

Adora hears the church bells tolling midnight distantly as the vampire before her bares her fangs. The rough bark of the tree she’d barely realized was there digs into her back. When the vampire bends her head to drink, Adora thinks. She’ll be unguarded in that moment, most likely, and Adora’s probably still stronger than her. She’ll throw all her weight into twisting away, maybe headbutt her as she descends.

She’s readied herself, but the vampire doesn’t bite. She only leans a little closer, to whisper in Adora’s ear. “Don’t worry, little Slayer. It’s not your time yet,” she says, in her lilting voice. “I’m only here to deliver a message. Lord Hordak’s trapped underground for now, and his power is limited, but that will change as soon as he’s freed. He’s waiting for you. It’ll be very soon now, won’t it?” Then the vampire releases her and steps lightly away.

Adora almost collapses with the sudden change in position, all the tension in her body left with nowhere to go. But not quite. As the vampire strolls away, Adora weights her stake in her hand before throwing it forward to embed itself right in the vampire’s back. She goes up in puff of still-laughing dust even as Adora slides breathlessly to the ground.

In school the following few days, Adora finds herself more frazzled than usual. She’s just managing to complete her homework assignments, with no time to fully learn each new concept, much less catch up on old ones she might have forgotten. Which is how she ends up hunched over her desk, poring over her AP review books, Thursday evening after patrol. Usually after debriefing with Lighthope she simply gets ready for bed. The few times in the beginning when she’d attempted anything productive after patrol, she hadn’t managed to do much other than upset her sleep schedule and make herself groggy. But for once she’s feeling pretty refreshed after her post-patrol shower, so she thinks she might as well try to get through a couple chapters of Calc review.

Maybe she shouldn’t care so much. She has so many bigger problems to worry about, problems that actually affect the lives and wellbeing of untold numbers of people. How she does on her AP tests or her finals as a senior probably isn’t even going to affect her own future. Still, she can’t seem to shake the part of her that’s invested, all the years in which not being ahead in all of her classes had made her feel out of control of her life.

And she could definitely use some control right now. She starts working through one of the Calc sections she’d ended up skipping when she’d transferred. She’s always liked math, the way the rules always stay the same, only build on top of each other. She likes the feeling when she’s got the steps for a problem all plotted out and only has to execute them.

A feeling that’s unfortunately eluding her. It doesn’t help that her energy after her shower is fading almost as quickly as it began. She shakes her head, trying to see if she can dislodge the sap-sticky strands of her tiredness, and finds she cannot. When her pencil lead snaps halfway through her third attempt at the same Taylor series problem, she can’t help—even knowing it’s a bad idea!—resting her head on the strangely plush curve of her workbook, closing her eyes, and slipping straight away into sleep.

The darkness is a hungry thing. It draws her tight into its dripping stomach, obscures what room she’s in. All she can see is that she’s kneeling before an old chrome grate, strangely familiar, square in all particulars. Each tile of empty black between the bands of metal winks at her in the same old shade of oblivion. Something wicked lies beyond and calls for her blood. She reaches for it, and she’s drowning.

Water buries her. She doesn’t know where she could be; the bottom of the ocean was never this empty. The deepest place on Earth is approximately eleven-thousand meters below sea level. She doesn’t know why she’s remembering this now, when it’s so cold here she’s forgotten warmth. The water stings her eyes as they struggle to pick out some lightless mote, a current of movement, anything that would make her less alone. There’s nothing. Instead, she curls in on herself, tucks her chin against her knees, flesh against flesh. She can feel it all in revolt, her cells and atoms greedy for air, air, air, turning against each other. Her lungs are collapsing. She opens her mouth to flood them, to fill all those buckling little rooms in her chest with water if not oxygen; and then she’s in a sea of stars.

Or maybe she’s one herself. Is it pain? Pain, a word meant for stimuli, for damage, for hurt. This is simply an existence. Her body pulses with the unbearable heat of fusion. But she feels it already in the marrow of her bones, the impossible weight, the peerless density of a dead star. She’s so bright she can’t look at herself.

And she’s not alone, she realizes. There, floating beside her, nestled in a curve of empty space, is Catra. She’s asleep, Adora realizes, curled up and peaceful the way she looked sometimes when Adora would wake in the middle of the night. Adora knows she shouldn’t, knows that beneath the glow of her sin there’s something radioactive and killing. But it’s not at all by her own will that her hand reaches out to rest on the side of Catra’s cheek. It’s just as she thought; she retracts her arm in horror, but already the unconstrainable energy has touched Catra, is arcing through the void to lap at her skin. Catra shudders and her eyes start to flutter open—

Adora wakes up to her (uncharged) phone going off across the room, a crick in her neck, and a little pink line in her cheek where it rested on her workbook all night. There’s a little bit of drool over her last calculations too. Gross. She’d gone to sleep with her light still on and everything. She stretches, feeling decidedly unrested and slightly disoriented. Lighthope had told her that as a Slayer she might dream premonitions, flashes of the past or future. She really hopes that that wasn’t what that was, although her hopes aren’t high.

The rest of the day seems to follow in similarly haphazard fashion. It’s Friday, so she has P.E., which has gone from one of her favorite classes to one of her least favorite. Catra had teased her when she decided to stick with it past the requirement, but she’d enjoyed the chance to work off some nervous energy in the middle of the school day. Unfortunately, with her new Slayer athleticism, P.E. is more like Drama than exercise, and that’s something she’s decidedly worse at.

It seems like a cheat to come in first in anything, even though she often had before she’d become Slayer, and she resents letting people beat her a kind of embarrassing amount. It’s especially hard now that they’re playing basketball, and her desire to utilize her superhuman reflexes is increased by her need to not let her teammates down. She also definitely gets some weird looks for not being tired or even out of breath after class, but they’re not as weird as the ones she got when she was trying to fake being out of breath. Yeah, she really hadn’t been selling that one well.

She feels a little better at lunch, sitting with Bow and Glimmer. She knocks over her carton of juice, but after that her luck seems to turn. She’s dreading being asked about how she’s doing, but they don’t push. Instead, Glimmer launches into a rant about the spells her mother’s insisting are too dangerous for her. Afterwards, she somehow seamlessly transitions into declaring that she and Bow are going to meet her in the library in the evening to help her research Hordak. Adora tries to protest, but Glimmer cuts her off.

“No, it’ll be fun,” she says. “Bow and I both have practice until five,” which means Marching Band for Glimmer and Robotics for Bow, “and then we’ll pop over to Roseanne’s Coffee to study and get dinner. I’ve been craving their pasta. After we’re done giving up all hope of understanding fifth declension conjugations and laughing ourselves silly about it, we’ll head back and put in an hour or two for saving the world. Not to mention, we’ll get to see you!”

Bow elbows Glimmer. “You’re the one who wanted to learn Latin in the first place.”

Glimmer groans. “I know! And I regret it!” she says, and Adora smiles into her meatball sub.

After school, sitting at a table in the library, she finishes her homework early and then manages to work out the Taylor series problem that had so confused her last night. She and Lighthope eat the dinner Lighthope packed of skinless chicken and steamed vegetables together—kind of bland, Adora can admit, but rigorously good for her! And she gets a tangerine afterwards, which is nice. Then she has an uneventful patrol, dusting some vamps outside a bar, before Lighthope picks her up and they return to the library. This turns out to be the last uneventful part of her day.

Bow and Glimmer and Entrapta are in the library when they get back.

“Best Friend Squad hug!” Bow says as soon as she comes in. He and Glimmer are already out of their seats. They’ve got her wrapped in their arms when Entrapta lets out a whoop from where she’s working on her laptop. Adora gently disentangles herself. “Did you find something, Entrapta?”

“Yes,” says Entrapta. “I’ve been trying to filter information by date and keywords. Thanks for mentioning that we ought to consider underground prisons, by the way, that was very helpful. Anyways, I’ve gotten a hit. Apparently there’s something like that in this book of prophecies written by this 18th century monk who reportedly was burned at the stake! So far, all of the prophecies have come to pass one way or another too. . .”

“So, the prophecy?” Adora prods.

“Sorry! It’s loading. . . it’s loaded. _The evening that the moon crosses Mars_ —that’s this Sunday, which is why it fit into the parameters of my search— _the vampire lord rises beneath the lunar city—_ Lunar city has to be Bright Moon.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Bow interjects.

“Let her finish!” Glimmer says.

Entrapta smiles and continues. “ _He will rattle his chains and break free of them, intent on destruction, as. . .”_

“As?” Lighthope asks, with unexpected impatience. Entrapta doesn’t even glance at her. She’s looking at Adora with some new expression on her face that Adora’s not sure she’s ever seen before, ever. On Entrapta, it’s as different from usual as a shadow is from its source.

“. . _as the Slayer dies,”_ Entrapta finishes.

Silence. Adora can feel everyone turning towards her. She just keeps her eyes on Entrapta’s, having already seen what’s there. With Bow, Glimmer, Lighthope—would it be shock? Pity? Resignation? She doesn’t want to know. She can’t stay and find out.

She chuckles weakly instead. “I—I need some air,” she says. “Don’t worry, I’ll go home afterwards. I just need. I need a moment,” she finishes, and then she’s scrambling her way out the door. No one tries to stop her.

She just walks, out of the school, onto the street, on and on. Her mind is very blank. She’s not feeling much of anything, not fear or anger or guilt. She just walks, and when her phone starts to go off she puts it on silent. She thinks that if she picked it up, if she heard Bow or Glimmer or Lighthope and their worry, if she was handed the weight of their concern, she suddenly would know what to feel, and she doesn’t want that.

She walks for a long time, until she reaches a park she recognizes. She and Catra used to come here, as kids. She pictures them at age six, running loops under the jungle gym. Adora had tripped and hit her head on the seesaw once, opened up a bloody gash. She wonders: if she went to look at it, would there be any scratch, any indentation in the wood? Would she have left any impression at all? There’s a bench in front of her; she sits in it.

This late at night it’s not very busy, but there is one father pushing a child on the swings. She watches as the girl launches herself off at the apex of her arc and sticks the ending, triumphantly. _I’m going to fail you_ , she thinks. Her stomach falls with it. Hordak is going to escape his prison on her watch, in order to dominate the city, and she’ll just be dead. To think she’d started to feel confident in being the Slayer, and that her tenure won’t even last two months. Not that Slayer lifespans were so long usually. She’d known already that she’d probably die young. But two months and a mess of a city left for whoever comes after her has to be a failure by any terms.

It has to have been a while since she left the library, close to an hour maybe—it’s hard to tell—but she doesn’t feel any better, or less empty. She kicks up a cloud of dust with her boot. She should get going, she knows. Or at least return a call, or text Lighthope and see if she’s willing to pick her up. She unlocks her phone and cringes immediately at all the missed notifications. Her finger hovers over the phone app, but swerves at the last moment. Mail. That seems safe. She has just one new one, which she can tell easily because she always keeps her inbox meticulously cleared. She taps it, automatically, not paying attention to the subject line or expecting much at all. Some online retailer she’s barely heard of, probably.

“Congratulations!” the email reads. “We are delighted to offer you admission to CSU Long Beach.”

The first thing she thinks, strangely, is _huh. Wasn’t expecting that today_ , followed by, _of course, they have rolling admission_. Immediately afterwards, she spends several minutes just hyperventilating on a park bench following her first college acceptance, which she realizes is not a good look. It’s all so stupid. She couldn’t go anyways; she’d have to pick somewhere in Bright Moon. She couldn’t go anyways, because she’ll be dead in two days.

She isn’t feeling empty anymore. She’s filling with _something_ , even if she doesn’t know what. It’s seeping in through her pores, between all her cells, and cutting off the air supply. Why is she having such a strong reaction? CSU Long Beach is a _safety_. It wasn’t—it wasn’t her dream future.

She’s not going to have any future at all. She does need to talk to someone suddenly, desperately. She needs to tell someone she got into college. Defiantly, or in a sob, she’s not sure. She hovers over her missed calls again—Bow and Glimmer and Lighthope, and even Entrapta (just once!) are there. But some sort of resentful unkindness has seized her. She’s always just going to have been. . . two months of their lives to them. She could tell them, and she knows that they would gasp, would comfort or congratulate her, but. They weren’t there, when she applied, when she was planning out what to do with her life after high school. She doesn’t know if she ever had a future to them. She barely knows if she had a past.

Suddenly, desperately, what she needs is to talk to Catra. She’s gotten off the park bench and her feet are moving already. She’s not far away at all. They’d always come here because it was the closest park to their house. It’s past eleven, so Catra will be home and in their—her—room, but certainly not asleep. It feels good to have a purpose again, even if doesn’t much ease everything else. She’s in front of her old house in no time at all, cutting across the packed dirt of their yard for Catra’s bedroom window.

It’s dark inside. Did Catra go to sleep uncharacteristically early? No, that’s the light of her phone on under the covers; her bed is right against the window, so it’s only a foot away. Adora knocks on the glass. Catra stills and pulls the blind back an inch. “Hey, Catra,” Adora says.

Catra slides the blinds up fully. “What do you want?” she says, in a remarkably normal tone.

“Can I. . . come in?” Catra raises a doubtful eyebrow, but maybe she hears something in Adora’s voice, because after a moment she does push the window open. Adora starts to climb in, but Catra stops her with a cutting movement over her throat.

“Um, no fucking shoes on the bed.”

Adora opens and closes her mouth. “You know what? Fair,” she says. She pushes out of her boots, standing awkwardly for a moment on top of them, before climbing through in only her socks. She sits crisscross on the bed. In front of her, Catra’s got her knees tucked to her chest, beneath the blankets.

“So?” says Catra. “Why are you here?”

“Maybe I just came to see you,” says Adora. Was that her speaking? It was the truth.

“Hmmm,” hums Catra. She’s frowning, but she seems content, if just for the moment, to sit there across from her. Adora doesn’t know if it’s the darkness, or this bed they’ve spent so many nights curled up together in, or the unrealness of having wanted to see Catra and then to be before her—at some point she’d mentally imagined a barrier between her old life and new, between her and Catra. It could have even been the crooked twist of the moon, but she feels some tentative sort of peace.

Adora pauses, in the beat after she’s decided to speak but before the words come. It almost all spills out then. I’m going to die on Sunday, and I’m scared, and I’m sad. I don’t know anything about what I’m doing, only that I’m thankful anytime I can stop someone from getting hurt. I miss you, I miss you, I miss you. Instead, she gets what she’d said she’d come for. She says, “I got into college.”

“What?” says Catra, startled out of nastiness. “Where?”

“CSU Long Beach.”

“Oh,” says Catra after a moment. “Of course, rolling admission.” Adora feels strangely vindicated by that. But it also makes sense; they’d researched schools together, and applied to all the same ones. Then something in Catra’s expression shifts, or else something is brought forward that was always there to begin with. “So you just came here to gloat?” she says, looking somewhere above Adora’s head.

“Can’t you just feel happy for me for once?” Adora says, in her tired voice. She would like that, she thinks, she would like to be warm. Or maybe she wouldn’t, maybe it would just sting.

There’s a long pause. “What were you going to do, if you hadn’t been the Slayer, and Shadoweaver had asked you to stay?”

“What?”

“It’s a simple question. I mean, here you are, happy about your options or whatever. But you know Shadoweaver wanted you to stay in Bright Moon. I don’t think she ever intended to let you go. Sometimes the other Watchers who’d visit would have ex-Potentials who’d aged out as assistants. Maybe she wanted you to do something like that.”

Adora can sense the trail Catra’s laying for her, some winding row of breadcrumbs leading to her anger if not her heart, but she can’t follow it. “She wasn’t that set on Bright Moon, was she?”

“Are you kidding? I think I saw her secretly throwing away brochures for out-of-state places a couple of times. She probably would have offered to let you live here rent-free or something, to make you stay. Would you have done it?” A bit of a sneer enters Catra’s voice. “What if she’d told you she needed you as her assistant, to help her keep track of the dark forces?”

“I—”

Catra’s not done. “Would you still have left me?” she asks, almost gently.

That feeling Adora had had, when they’d fought in the yard. The sand slipping away, the water closing in. “I never. . . I never had any version of my future that didn’t have you in it,” she says. She’s practicing the past tense.

“You understand why that’s hard to believe,” says Catra, and leans her head back against the bedframe, looking up at the ceiling. Maybe if they hadn’t been sitting so close on the same mattress, Adora wouldn’t have noticed her little bodily flinch with the movement.

“Are you hurt?” Adora asks, on impulse. Even though she knows, of course, that Catra’s hurt all the time. She had been too, before her Slayer healing. It just came with the territory of being a Potential. But when she sees Catra and the twitch of pain, she needs to fix it, to separate the two. The image of her dream comes over her, briefly, Catra peaceful in sleep.

“I told you, Adora,” says Catra. Her head’s still tilted back, and she’s trembling. Adora knows even before she finishes speaking that this is going to be the type of anger that demolishes. “Stop thinking you can protect me, or anyone else. I don’t need you in my life. I _never_ needed you in my life.”

Bracing for the blow didn’t help, only left her skin with sandpaper abrasions where it wasn’t ultimately gouged in. She feels bereft. An old stone arch separated from its keystone, surprised by its sudden inability to bear weight. Is this the answer Adora came for, to be told she didn’t have a past after all? “I’m never going to ask you for anything ever again,” she says, because she can afford to. “Just look at me, please.”

She doesn’t know why this is what she’s asking for. They were both shifty-eyed kids, who’d never really outgrown the habit. She doesn’t need another look in order to carry Catra’s image with her, Sunday evening when she goes to meet her death. She’s going to be carrying it with her anyways, one way or the other. Maybe she’s searching for something there, in her face. Some sign of leniency. She remembers the alleyway, when Catra had said she hated her, and how she had known she’d meant something by it as much as she’d known it wasn’t true.

Catra tilts her head and looks. Adora examines her, the collection of colors and forms that she’s known at every point in the last thirteen years better than her own face. The curving shadows cast night after night by this very same streetlamp, almost as familiar. The silvered plane the light draws on the defiant slope of her cheek, the minute pursing of her small, dark mouth, visible only because Adora understands its normal shape implicitly. 

Catra’s staring back just as intently. She fixes Adora in her gaze. What can she see there, Adora wonders. She feels for a moment like she used to. Like someone shared the same space and time as her. Maybe this is what she came for, after all.

Then Catra’s mouth twists up like a rag. “Is this it, then? That’s all you wanted? I’m glad, then. I never want to see you again.”

You won’t.

Adora almost dives out the window. She realizes she’s still in her socks very suddenly, but can’t bear the thought of standing still there for the minute or two it would take to put on her boots. Instead she picks them up, holding them together in her right hand as she treads across the cold earth in her shoeless feet.

I should not have come, she thinks, burning. But as she passes the property line she remembers: forty-eight dwindling hours, and she turns back to catch another glimpse of the moonlit face in the window.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> message for everybody: thank you for reading! please consider leaving a comment, or coming to talk to me on [tumblr](jade-ellsworth.tumblr.com). it’s not going to, like, affect me writing this story, because i’m doing this purely out of love and off the tender support of my friends (especially my previously mentioned beta ross and gf emily!). however it would make me happy, so there’s that.
> 
> special message for buffy fans: yes, i have cast scorpia in a tara-esque role. no, i will not let any harm befall her. she’s also… not going to date glimmer? (i think….) also, no, you will not get any bonus points for decrypting adora’s prophetic dream, you’re playing on easy mode.
> 
> actually additional note: i don’t think i realized how much i deviate from standard fic scorpia characterizations until i started writing this fic and i was like hmmmm… essential scorpia facts: she's socially anxious because she hasn't had friends before, she has problematically low self-esteem, and she has some hangups regarding morality. . . i love her and i think she deserves a character arc you know?


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